IT’S THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE BOLSHOI!
JENNIFER LAWRENCE was right on pointe for her new film, playing a ballerina who becomes a skilled Russian espionage agent.
The Academy Award-winning actress stars in Red Sparrow as Dominika Egorova, an operative for the KGB’s foreign intelligence service who’s lethal in unarmed combat.
She also has synaesthesia: a quality that enables her to see emotions — light and dark — as colours.
Francis Lawrence ( no relation), who directed the 27-year-old in Red Sparrow and three of her Hunger Games films (Catching Fire and Mockingjay parts 1 and 2) told me that while Jennifer is not blessed (or cursed) with the condition ‘ she’s very instinctive’.
‘I met her when she was about 20. She didn’t study for years and years at drama school. What’s fascinating about her is that she’s very intuitive and a very quick read of people. It’s uncanny, the way she can channel that reading into her work.
‘ She doesn’t like to rehearse and needs very little preparation,’ the filmmaker explained when we talked at Air Studios in Hampstead, London, where he was overseeing the final session with film composer James Newton Howard.
Howard was scoring a sequence using strings, to create a jangling, almost Hitchcockian sound.
I found it pretty heartstopping reading former CIA officer Jason Matthews’s debut novel four years ago, let alone watching the dramatic moments being realised on a large screen.
The book’s crawling with high- level moles. After Dominika is invalided out of the Bolshoi, her uncle, who’s in charge of a Russian spy division, trains her up and sends her to what’s known as Sparrow School: a kind of Courtesan College where women and men are taught espionage seduction.
Dominika’s superiors want her to entrap a CIA officer called Nate Nash (played by Joel Edgerton in the film) and find out who his mole is in the Kremlin.
Soon moles, and other creatures, are coming out to play on the streets of Moscow, Helsinki and Washington DC. Director Lawrence read the story and immediately saw it was one for his Hunger Games star. He knew from working with her that Jennifer would nail the action and dramatic scenes. But she also mastered the dancing.
‘She did three months of intensive ballet training,’ he said. And while a ballet double was used for difficult dance scenes, Jennifer ‘did her fair share, which is remarkable’.
The scorching cast for Red Sparrow also includes Charlotte Rampling as the mistress of Sparrow School; Joely Richardson as Dominika’s mother; and Jeremy Irons, Ciaran Hinds, Douglas Hodge and Matthias Schoenaerts as Kremlin spooks.
The film will open here on March 2.