Wilde takes turn for the twisted
Co-stars in Deadfall with Eric Bana
“Oh my God,” says Olivia Wilde. “My birthday. My 27th birthday was spent upside-down in a car in a sparkling minidress in heels in 15-below weather with Eric Bana — that’s the good part — in six-foot snow in sleet and rain. Shivering.”
Wilde, a green-eyed beauty who at the time was riding the waves of gossip, talent and sex appeal into outright movie stardom, looks chilly. She is curled up on a couch in a grungy salon she calls a “porn room,” the lounge of Motel Iberville (“Chambres 75$”) a couple of hours south of Montreal. The motel is a stand-in for the Staghorn Saloon in Michigan, the setting for a scene in a new thriller, Deadfall, in which she co-stars with Bana.
It’s the winter of 2011. A few days earlier, in the late-winter snows of rural Quebec, they were filming a car crash scene, the one in which her character was hanging from the overturned wreck.
“Which is a great scene,” Wilde continues. “Nevertheless, it was pretty hellish. What made it wonderful was every time I reached a low point, Eric Bana would sing, ‘Happy birthday to you.’ Oh God, thank God you’re so funny.”
She spent most of the day in suspended animation (“I believe at one point the blood was rushing to my head at such a rate they had to stop before I passed out.”) And as her dress was falling down from the top and up from the bottom — she recalls the crew being not unhappy with this development — she had to remind herself that it’s not easy to be more than just another pretty face in Hollywood.
The story is a dark one, which may be part of the reason the movie took so long to get to the screen. Producer Gary Levinsohn describes it as “what happens when a psycho invites himself over for Thanksgiving.” Wilde and Bana play Liza and Addison, a brother and sister who rob a bank and go on the run, and Charles Hunnam is Jay, an ex-convict they meet along the way.
Recently back in Iberville, Wilde and Hunnam are filming a scene in which Liza and Jay meet in a tough bar and compare bad childhoods. (The film was written by Zach Dean who was on an airline flight when the plane’s wheels locked and he decided that if he lived through the landing, he would write a story about family. “And this is what came out of him,” said Levinsohn.)
It’s dark, but it’s real, and that’s not always the case for Wilde, who frequently found herself fodder for tabloids and the lad magazines.
“I found myself shocked by the script,” she says. “A little disturbed, which I think is a good thing. I was more emotionally affected by it than I thought I would be, seeing as how it’s a thriller. It’s got a lot more meat to it than I expected. The themes of family and connection and forgiveness are interesting to me.”
Wilde says there is a “Coen Brothers strangeness” to Deadfall, “and also a stark sense that may come from our director not being American.” It was made by Stefan Ruzowitzky, an Austrian who won an Oscar for his Holocaust-set drama The Counterfeiters.