Dormer gives up control in her first horror film
NEW YORK — Natalie Dormer is used to playing strong-minded women who get what they want.
Damsel-in-distress in the horror film The Forest is kind of a new thing for her.
“I guess I’m often a control freak onscreen,” Dormer says with a laugh.
“I never thought of that, but it’s true,” says the actress who, as Margaery Tyrell on Game of Thrones, schemed her way to a (brief) marriage to King Joffrey, and did likewise with Henry VIII in her role as Anne Boleyn in The Tudors.
And then there was her role as Cressida, Katniss Everdeen’s goaloriented private videographer and fellow rebel fighter in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Parts 1 and 2.
Dormer’s character has no control to wield in the psychologically-shaded The Forest.
She plays Sara, an American whose twin sister has gone missing in Japan’s mysterious Aokigahara forest — a.k.a. the Suicide Forest at the foot of Mount Fuji.
Minutes into the movie, we’ve seen her follow her sibling’s footsteps and head into the woods with a journalist (Chicago Fire’s Taylor Kinney).
And then stuff happens.
It’s Dormer’s first horror film, and she welcomed the opportunity.
“I will always try something that takes me out of my comfort zone. I read the script and I loved the premise of the relationship between the sisters, and the trauma that they suffered in their childhood.
“And the control freakery that Sara hung onto her entire adult life, how it dissipates, and how she slowly descends into madness and unravels. That’s like catnip to an actor to play that emotional spiralling down.”
There are jump-out-at-you scares in the film, by the Japanese ghosts called yurei.
“I jumped out of my seat a couple of times, which is a testament to the editor. It’s preposterous because I should know where the jump is coming. I know the scene where the jump is coming, but the exact second remains a surprise.”
Forests, she agrees, “are freakin’ scary,” particularly the one where they shot, Serbia’s Tara National Forest. “It took me back to my grandmother reading me Hans Christian Andersen or the Brothers Grimm. There is this great tradition we have in fairy tales, where the protagonist goes into the forest to meet their fate and face their demons.
“There’s also something of (the late mythologist) Joseph Campbell, the hero’s journey walking into an alien environment and meeting characters you can’t trust.”
Already wrapped in Dormer’s busy hiatus schedule is the disease pandemic thriller Patient Zero, which is due out in September. After that, she admits she’s turned down some paycheques to follow a dream.
Dormer has co-written In Darkness with director Anthony Byrne, a revenge thriller in which she plays a blind musician who hears a murder.
“I think it was Frances McDormand who said the only power you have as an actor is to say no. And I did have to say no to something commercial to do this.”