I was so trained that you do not break your façade. You never raise your voice. If you need to, you walk out of the room, you sort your shit out, you come back, and you do your job. So whilst we were doing these scenes, there were moments when I, as Rebecca, felt I’m feeling something in my throat. I’m actually feeling sad, and if I lean into this, I’m going to burst, start crying any second. So I would turn and leave my station, and then Kathryn would come back and go, “Where did you go?” And I said, “I just walked into the room. I had a moment.” Two seconds later, before we did the take, there was a camera in there. She grabbed it and they followed me in, and I decided to do the phone call in there.
The other time it happened was sitting and looking at my [character’s son’s] dinosaur toy—that wasn’t in the script. I thought, It’s the tiny little human thing that I can bring in sneakily. I leaned away from the camera, but I didn’t realize that there was another camera that grabbed the moment—it wasn’t planned.
The film feels especially timely at the moment, in this country.
It’s important that this is not referring to any form of active presidency in the world, and it’s not just referring to America. There is no one single baddie in this film. The baddie is the system and the structure, and then you can analyze and have your own opinion. But this is a question about nuclear war and nuclear weapons.
How are you handling the time we’re in now, where there’s so much to be concerned about politically and internationally?
I don’t read the news, and I don’t say that lightly. I don’t have Instagram because I didn’t like the way it was feeding me news—it felt filtered. If I read the news, I want to choose my outlet, and I wish to choose from every angle so that I get every perspective. I find people like Kathryn, she deep dives into it and she goes to people who she believes in to give her news and information. I find it hard to give time to that, and I feel like it would break me. I know what’s happening in the world, but I’m not well-versed enough to stand on the barricades to have the arguments. I wish I could, because I’m a person with very strong moral values and opinions. I know exactly where I stand. But I feel like right now, everything that I would say would be an empty platitude in comparison to how I actually feel. I find the world a very sad and horrendous place right now.
