‘WALKING DEAD’ GIRL MEETS ‘THE BOY’
One of the movie’s main characters is a lifelike doll, Brahms
After dealing with a seriously creepy doll in her new movie, having to face zombies on a regular basis wasn’t so bad for Lauren Cohan.
The Walking Dead TV star takes a lead role on the big screen in director William Brent Bell’s thriller The Boy (in theaters Jan. 22, 2016). Cohan plays an all-American girl named Greta who is hired by an older couple in a small English town to be their nanny.
Soon enough, Greta figures out why no one else wanted the job: The Heelshires (Jim Norton and Diana Hardcastle) have strange ways of coping with their son’s death 20 years ago, and one of them is treating a life-size doll named Brahms like a real child.
Greta spends the whole time walking on eggshells because of the couple’s weirdly strict rules for taking care of Brahms, yet she doesn’t have any choice but to plow forward. “She needs the money and she’s getting paid an obscene amount,” Cohan says. “It adds to the uneasiness.”
Initially, nothing made Cohan as uncomfortable as working with Brahms. “It was so disturbing in ways that I didn’t anticipate,” she says. “The doll feels that much more real, and when you think about little creepy, evil children, that gets you on a much more sinister level.”
Things start going wrong when Greta doesn’t follow the rules and she begins to hear little footsteps and a child’s voice when she picks up the phone. It gets more terrifying from there, “but there’s something that makes her stay and she doesn’t understand why,” Cohan says.
“We’ll have some fun twists and see what that is. For a large part of the film, it’s a suffocating situation that she somehow doesn’t leave, against every reasonable inkling.”
Yet, she adds, “the doll and what we think we see is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s scary, but what’s beyond scary is what’s really creepy.”
Cohan does find some beauty amid the psychological terror in The Boy: There’s an intangible spiritual element involved, and the doll’s “parents” do truly love Brahms. “There’s so much bittersweet sadness in how they treat him,” the actress says.
Plus, the elegant British setting feels like a wholly different period: “She’s a girl of this day and age coming from a very different life in the States,” Cohan says. “She’s going over there hoping for some respite from things, and goes in this time warp.”
Cohan would carry Brahms around in between takes, letting her imagination run wild. She started to find life in the doll the more she let it become her scene partner. “He becomes amazingly lifelike. He’s so beautifully created,” she says.
“We shot a very quiet movie, and it wasn’t about the action,” Cohan says. “It was about the places your mind goes to when you don’t have other human contact. So, yeah, I got to explore some pretty dark places with an inanimate object.”
“It was so disturbing in ways that I didn’t anticipate. ... When you think about little creepy, evil children, that gets you on a much more sinister level.” Lauren Cohan on working with a doll