Love and power Shakespeare
to modern-day Oklahoma
The set of “Wicked Love” was in constant motion.
During the second day of filming in late July, the feature film invaded a Yukon home. Lighting technicians lugged equipment to different positions; costume and makeup artists wove in and out of rooms, trading out materials; actors prepared themselves for upcoming scenes.
A woman knelt over a jersey in a case, quickly gluing down the final letters on the back.
“Where’s my jersey?” a man shouted from across the room.
“T-minus two minutes!” she yelled back.
Shortly after, the case was hung on the wall, with a blue-and-white football jersey sporting the name “Macbeth.”
The name’s not just an Easter egg. “Wicked Love” is a modern adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” restructuring the play to focus on a high school football team in a small Oklahoma town. The Macbeth is Mac, a football star. His controlling father, Duncan, is a retired NFL athlete and high school football coach.
Although Mac is the star of the team, he’s not the star of the movie. The film centers instead on Missy, the adaptation’s Lady Macbeth.
“I really wanted to do a female protagonist,” said Conor Allyn, the film’s director. “One of the strongest female protagonists from stories we all know in literature is the story of Lady Macbeth. She’s known as being a villain, and I thought it would be interesting if … we tell it from her point of view and make her the hero instead.”
The film is a loose adaptation of the play, said Allyn, who co-wrote the film with his brother, Jake. It references major plot points and characters but mostly follows in the wake of its leading couple.
Conor Allyn said there are nods to other “Macbeth” characters throughout the film, including an influential school counselor stepping in for the classic witches, and a character named Duffy, referencing Macduff.
The biggest departure from the original is the leading characters’ motivation, Allyn said.
In the film, the football stadium is like a kingdom, and Coach Duncan is its king, said producer Stacia Crawford. When he tries to keep his son away from Missy, the two retaliate, and by doing so quickly fall down a dark path. In the film, their struggles come not in the attempt to gain power, as they do in the play, but in the attempt to protect their love.
“There’s the archetype
of the manipulative, ambitious woman,” Allyn said. “With this story, we try to show that there was another story at play. … Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are killing out of love instead of killing out of ambition.”
Emotional stakes
The film is expected to come out either late 2016 or early 2017, Crawford said. Shot throughout Yukon and Oklahoma City, the film is executive producer Kristofer McNeeley’s second Oklahoma-based film this year, following up this summer’s release of the domestic drama “Great Plains.”
With McNeeley, local casting director Chris Freihofer, deadCenter Film Festival winner Jacob Leighton Burns (“Electric Nostalgia”) on camera and a collection of Oklahoma cast and crew members, “Wicked Love” is fueled by an undercurrent of state talent.
The film revolves tightly around football. McNeeley said he wanted to set the film in Oklahoma to strengthen the atmosphere of a small town, where everything surrounding the team would be given higher stakes and deeper emotional significance.
“This is not about a big football program, but rather a small-town community where football is kind of their marker for everything that is great,” McNeeley said.
More than anything, the story merges classic characters and Shakespeare’s dark themes with the fervent, escalating world of small-town Oklahoma.
“It’s ‘Friday Night Lights’ meets ‘Natural Born Killers’ meets ‘Macbeth,’ ” McNeeley said.
“Anytime someone is in their own world and is so caught up in their own ego and their own desires, things can go horribly wrong. And that’s what we have here in this story with Lady Macbeth.”