Femme fatale; Novel pursuit; Driving force.
In her first major television role, Italian actor Matilda De Angelis not only shared the screen with her idol Nicole Kidman, but some steamy love scenes at that. Her subsequent star turn has helped make The Undoing one of the most buzzed about shows of the year. By Holly Byrnes.
BORN IN BOLOGNA, residing in Rome, with her sultry brown eyes fixed firmly on a career in Hollywood, Matilda De Angelis is a young woman with the world at her sun-kissed feet.
Anointed a shooting star of the 2018 Berlin Film Festival, the 25-year-old is beginning her international trajectory propelled by her remarkable debut performance in new HBO thriller, The Undoing – starring megawatt names including Nicole Kidman, Hugh Grant and Donald Sutherland.
Playing the drama’s femme fatale, Elena, whose bold sexuality imposes itself on the world of Kidman’s character, Grace, the young actor had to steel herself for a number of nude scenes and even sharing a kiss with the Australian superstar. Not a bad introduction to the global stage, she giggles, admitting her fandom for Kidman began as a child and only compounded her nerves when the lip-locking scene unfolded.
She is full of praise for her screen idol, describing Kidman in mythical terms (“she doesn’t walk, she floats”). “She’s not a technical actor,” De Angelis observes, “she’s perfect all the time but she changes every time. And the scene is never the same with her, so it’s a constant surprise. She has this freedom and this beautiful instinct, and that really inspired me. It’s incredible when she has been working so many years and she’s still this pure and natural.”
She continues: “It’s incredible. I tried to steal everything I could from her, just watching her.”
It is an impressive debut for De Angelis, who convinced director Susanne Bier and the producing team, including Kidman, she had what the role needed; not to mention the body confidence to pull off those scenes.
While De Angelis is a popular name in Italian film, The Undoing is the first big-budget role she had auditioned for (she will next star opposite Liev Schreiber in an upcoming adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s Across the River and into the Trees). Recording the audition herself from her home in Italy, De Angelis admits she was a fish out of water during the long-distance casting process. “When you don’t have a director with you to guide you through the process, you have to do everything blind,” she explains. Whatever she conjured worked, as De Angelis was summoned to meet Bier the next week in New York, where she was promptly offered the part.
It was only during that introduction that De Angelis discovered the explicit scenes required, but bravely didn’t flinch. “Susanne and I talked a lot and we both wanted to pose Elena to be extreme. She had to make Grace feel very uncomfortable … she’s unpredictable.”
In the post-#MeToo world, scenes like those De Angelis found herself playing are a much more choreographed affair and subject to more scrutiny and supervision than ever before. “We had an intimacy co-ordinator on set, but you have to be comfortable with yourself,” De Angelis says. “You have to feel comfortable with your partner, you have to trust your partner … I think that’s the most important part of the process. Nudity is a way to express myself,” she adds, “and sometimes emotional nudity is way more difficult to handle.”
The intimacy coach put De Angelis in control, offering advice that she will take with her in her career ahead. “You choose how to be touched and what to do and you have to take control of the situation. That’s how you’re not a victim.”
It was her co-star Hugh Grant who “was more nervous than I was”, De Angelis reveals. “He was really attentive and caring, so all good.”
De Angelis has now expanded her career horizons beyond being “just an Italian actress. I want to open a bigger window in the world of acting. I would love to work with as many directors and producers and actors as I can, whether that is in Italy, France, England or America. It doesn’t matter as long as I want to tell that story.” The Undoing is now streaming on Binge, home to the world’s best shows.