CYNTHIA ERIVO AS JACQUELINE
THE ACTOR STARS AS A DISPLACED WOMAN FIGHTING FOR SURVIVAL IN REFUGEE DRAMA DRIFT
THE FAMILY CONNECTION
In Drift, Cynthia Erivo plays a Liberian woman who’s fled the country’s civil war, ending up scrabbling for survival under the piercing blue summer sky on a Greek island. For character background, Erivo turned to her mum, Edith, who’d been displaced as a 15-year-old girl during Nigeria’s Biafran War of the late 1960s. “I used her as my biggest resource,” she says, before joking that it can be typically hard to extract personal memories from her parents’ generation. But her mum opened up. “She would talk about the fear she felt, about how she and her siblings didn’t know if they would be able to find food or shelter at any time.” The conversations further connected Erivo to Jacqueline’s determination.
THE SETTING
Shooting on location in Greece, Erivo let herself feel as uncomfortable as Jacqueline might, hungry and exposed to the elements on rocky terrain. “At night, you let the cold, the dark, the wind and the sounds affect you so that you can do something that’s completely truthful,” she says. Preparing to bed down in makeshift shelters under a threadbare blanket helped her to tap into Jacqueline’s guarded physicality.
“When you’re cold, your muscles tense up, you can’t necessarily think straight — and you use those things to your advantage.”
THE CLOTHES
Flashback scenes show Jacqueline’s content, middle-class life in the UK before suffering a life-changing trauma while visiting family in Liberia. With little more than the clothes on her back in Greece, Jacqueline rotates between a couple of T-shirts and a denim skirt. Erivo and costume designer Matina Mavraganni chose to mostly dress Jacqueline in washed-out shades of blue to blend her into the background. “The blue is also reminiscent of water, of where she is — there’s an unattached-ness that blue has, and I wanted that for her. It’s not a colour that screams, ‘This is me.’ There’s no statement in it, necessarily. It’s something that she can disappear in.”
THE MUSIC
Before shooting, Erivo would listen to a prep playlist on morning runs “because it gave me a sense of release” from all the tension that Jacqueline carried in her neck and shoulders. Tracy Chapman’s ‘Remember The Tinman’, YEBBA’S ‘My Mind’ and ‘Let Me Go’ by Mykal Kilgore all featured. “A lot of those songs are about our relationship to memory, and about particular people, too,” she says. “Those themes are what Jacqueline is consistently fighting against and fighting through: the loss of something, the memory of something, and trying to make the connection between all of it.” In her portrayal of a woman trying to rebuild her life — and as a producer on the film — Erivo has forged a connection all of her own.
DRIFT IS IN CINEMAS FROM 29 MARCH