Much has been said about Lupita Nyong’o’s dislike of interview junkets – she likened them to a “torture technique” earlier this year – so when I had the brief pleasure of sitting down with her to chat all things A Quiet Place: Day One, I obviously had to address the elephant in the room.
Was simply seeing my face pop up on Zoom torturous? Was our interview scarier than the film itself? Would these four minutes with me be worse than an alien invasion?
It turns out that this question left both Lupita and her co-star Joseph Quinn a bit stumped.
Because, you know, it’s hard to decipher what is scarier — a journalist or a blind monster with supersonic hearing that will murder you in a split second. I’m being serious!
“Well… there’s more junkets than there are invasions. So we do more of them,” Quinn mused.
“And we survive them,” added Nyong’o, raising her eyebrows and smiling.
“They’re the same,” Quinn jokes.
It’s this light banter and humour that helped Quinn and Nyong’o stay sane throughout filming the movie. Quinn said the atmosphere was light when the cameras stopped rolling, because things were really, well, quiet when they were shooting.
“It was remarkable how funny a disaster film kind of has to be [outside] of action and cut,” he said.
“We had a laugh [and really] got to know each other.”
The three leads of the film: Eric (Joseph Quinn), Sam (Lupita Nyong’o) and Frodo (Schnitzel & Nico). (Image: Paramount Pictures Australia)
The pair aren’t strangers to the monster and horror genre, with our scream queen working with horror master Jordan Peele on the 2019 film Us, and Quinn fighting off monsters in Stranger Things season four.
They didn’t specifically seek out another monster or horror film to work on next, but were attracted by how character-driven the script for A Quiet Place: Day One was. It’s the franchise’s strength, because if you can get audiences invested in whether certain characters live or die, it raises the stakes.
“It’s more a case of finding material that resonates with you and characters that interest you, rather than seeking monster films, personally,” Quinn said.
“Same here,” Nyong’o agreed. “I’m attracted to the characters that are being offered up, I’m also attracted to the story that is being told. I think the monsters are a metaphor and they’re a device, but there’s something else beyond that in the stories that I’ve chosen to take on. That’s what I’m attracted to, the deeper meaning [and] the deeper story.”
Is the cat Frodo a big character in A Quiet Place: Day One?
As the resident cat-obsessed writer, I feared more for Frodo’s (the cat) life than anyone else in the film. Nyong’o originally was terrified of cats – she believed they were like mini lions – so she had to go through Paramount-provided cat therapy to get over her fears.
“I had to really face my fear of cats in order to play this role. It was one of the things that I was hesitating about saying yes, because I’ve been scared of cats my entire life,” she said.
“Here I was being asked to look like I owned a cat! You can’t really pretend to like cats, or at least I didn’t know how.”
Frodo is a scene stealer. (Image: Paramount Pictures Australia)
There’s a particular scene where Nyong’o’s character Sam, Quinn’s character Eric and Frodo have to float through a flooded subway. It’s wild, and nail-biting, and I couldn’t wrap my head around how it was even possible.
“By the time we filmed that scene I was very comfortable with the cats… [but] the thing you learn about cat behaviour is that they don’t like water. And so when I read the scene when we had a cat, in water, that was stressful,” she recalled.
Nyong’o and Quinn are terrific in the film, but I firmly believe that Frodo deserves his time to shine as well. Paramount, can we pls get a junket with Frodo?
You can find out if the cat survives when A Quiet Place: Day One hits cinemas on June 27.
The post I Asked A Quiet Place Star Lupita Nyong’o What’s Worse: An Alien Invasion Or A 4-Min Interview appeared first on PEDESTRIAN.TV .
