Why I took on my darkest, weirdest role yet
Imogen Poots, star of Green Room and 28 Weeks Later, on making her sci-fi debut in creepy suburban horror Vivarium
IMOGEN POOTS IS no stranger to a tough gig. She’s fought off neo-nazis in Green Room and zombies in 28 Weeks Later. But she had never made a full-blown sci-fi, until Vivarium, a Twilight Zone-esque nightmare about a young couple imprisoned in a phantom suburbia. The genre was a compelling place to explore, says Poots.
“If you think of Sigourney Weaver in Alien and recently Toni Collette in Hereditary, you start to realise that sci-fi offers a tremendous platform for exploration of the female psyche,” she says. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a lot of female actors are drawn to really dark roles.”
Vivarium gets properly dark, even in the mundane setting of a nice, neat English housing estate, as Poots finds herself as a mother to a creepy boy who may or may not be human. But Poots was careful to bring humanity to the role. “Everything is going to crap, so I think to find flickers of hope where you can is so important,” she says of the story, which she describes as an endurance test, both on and off screen.
In preparation, Poots watched intense, mind-bending thrillers such as Shane Carruth’s
Upstream Colour and Hiroshi Teshigahara’s
Woman In The Dunes to get her in the right mindset; then listened to Cat Stevens to feel less intense.
She also recommended co-star Jesse Eisenberg — who she worked with on comedy
The Art Of Self-defense — to play her unravelling husband. “I thought it would be interesting for him to play a real alpha,” she says. “And he’s one of the funniest people I know, which was important on this job.” The film puts Poots and Eisenberg through the wringer both physically and emotionally. Domestic bliss never looked quite so terrifying.