Aiming for ‘empathy’
‘Cherry’ star’s plea to understand addicts’ plight
Ciara Bravo hopes something sweet stems from “Cherry.”
The actress stars alongside Tom Holland in the drama and is eager for the film to eliminate stigmas surrounding the opioid epidemic.
“A lot of the topics this film covers, conversations have started,” Bravo, 23, told the Daily News.
“What I hope happens with this film is it furthers those conversations and hopefully opens people’s eyes to another way of life. But what I hope they leave with most is empathy. I hope that they can empathize with these characters and understand what they’re going through, and in turn empathize with the people in their life that are going through something similar.”
Bravo’s character, Emily, is a college student who falls in love with Holland’s Cherry and stays committed to him as he joins the Army and is deployed to Iraq.
After Cherry returns home and struggles with PTSD, he and Emily develop drug dependencies.
“What we notice through
Emily is what can happen when you don’t take care of yourself mentally and physically,” Bravo said. “When you don’t seek help from outside sources, and what can happen when you allow yourself to get too lost in another person for too long.”
Bravo and Holland met in person only two weeks before they started shooting “Cherry,” out Friday on Apple TV+ and now playing in select theaters.
They quickly developed chemistry.
“It just allowed us to have this safety blanket when we were in a scene doing really hard stuff,” Holland, 24, told The News. “If I fell apart or I fell to pieces, she was there to pick me up, and vice versa. I was really, really lucky to have her in this film with me.”
Bravo got her start as a child actress, appearing on multiple Nickelodeon projects including “Big Time Rush.” More recently she starred on YouTube’s dark comedy series “Wayne.”
“I’ve never done something as intense as this movie, and it was intimidating, but as an actor you always hope that your work is able to grow and mature as you grow and mature,” Bravo said. “I certainly feel like ‘Cherry’ is that for me.”
Bravo was one of hundreds of actresses who tried out for the part of Emily. She stood out so much in her audition tape that directors Joe and Anthony Russo agreed on her almost instantly.
The filmmakers hope “Cherry” opens the eyes of younger viewers.
“This movie was made for Gen Z,” Joe Russo told The News. “It was made for our children. They’re the ones who are most at risk in this crisis. The movie is about a young man who doesn’t have a lot of life experience who makes a decision that he doesn’t have the experience to make.”
Adds Anthony Russo: “We hope this movie leaves people with a sense of hope that there is a road forward, that there is a better tomorrow, that there’s a way to persevere and find a way through these very difficult problems.”