AIRLIE DODDS
The Australian actress fights for her life in horror movie The Furies (out now), which sees a group of women hunted in the bush by an array of armed and masked killers.
What interested you about The Furies?
I liked the journey of a passive to active character. It felt like quite a human thing to explore, as a lot of shy people are sometimes just preserving themselves.
How high is your tolerance for horror? Have you made it all the way through this movie?
I have seen the film a few times and still find it pretty irksome. I suppose that is part of it. I don’t know if my tolerance is particularly high. I’m a fairly reactive person and find myself falling for jump scares – really predictable ones, too. Did the killers’ costumes make it easy to channel fear? More the schedule – it was really fast! The stuntmen who played them were really funny and had lunch in their costumes, so I was weirdly acclimatised to them.
Your character does a fair bit of breathless running. Was the shoot exhausting?
Yeah, it was, in a fairly invigorating and euphoric sense. Fear is such a physical thing, so running helps that.
Without giving away any twists, what would you say is the point of The Furies for those who suggest it’s just senseless violence? The film embodies the tropes of a violent slasher, just as much as it rails against them. It’s a fun and traditional horror film, with a darker connotation of female entrapment, and how painful, confusing and brave it can be to supersede that for a young girl.
You’re in the coming series The Gloaming, too. What can you tell us about that? It’s a gothic thriller about two detectives who knew each other in high school and are drawn together by a mysterious death.
I play a fairly whimsical character, and as it rattles on there are hints as to why.