Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on July 5, 2011, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
In Insidious, now hitting DVD and Blu-ray next week from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment and reviewed here, Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne give compelling performances as a married couple whose young son falls into a coma, leading the pair to confront the supernatural forces responsible. It’s the two actors’ first venture into ghost-movie territory, though both have genre experience that they discussed with Fango.
As opposed to the gradual, carefully composed terrors of Insidious, Byrne took her first leap into genre territory with 2007’s in-your-face 28 Weeks Later, the well-received sequel to 28 Days Later in which she plays Major Scarlet Ross, a military doctor dealing with a new outbreak of the rage virus. “That was a much more physical film” than Insidious, she tells Fango. “We were running, I had guns, I had a broken knee or something—I remember [co-star] Jeremy Renner carrying me for most of the film through the abandoned streets of London. It was much more visual, with all the different landscapes. It was all about London being abandoned, which was what was so fantastic about the first 28 Days Later. Seeing this huge city with nothing in it was so cool and effective, and I remember shooting in certain parts of London, like Piccadilly Circus or Shaftesbury Avenue; we would have them for two minutes on a Sunday morning at 5 or 6 a.m., and managed to block the street down and cover it with newspapers and walk down it. I remember shooting in an abandoned tube stop; that was pretty creepy. They managed to get a whole abandoned station, which was wild. I’m really proud of that film.”
The Australian-born Byrne, who got her big Hollywood break in 2004’s Troy and also appeared in Alex Proyas’ 2009 paranormal action/drama Knowing, recalls being a horror fan from a young age. “When I was little,” she says, “I loved Creepshow and the original Elm Streets, and then I got into The Shining and Rosemary’s Baby, all the classics. I loved getting scared; we’d have sleepovers and watch these scary films and freak ourselves stupid. I was such a fan of [28 Days Later]; it was just fantastic, and then I went on to work with Danny Boyle and Cillian Murphy on [the science-fiction thriller] Sunshine, so I got to know those guys, and that’s how I got onto 28 Weeks Later. I thought it was so cool, I loved all the zombies…pardon me, the infected [laughs], they were called. We weren’t actually allowed to call them zombies. There was a huge delineation that we had to make!”
Insidious marks a complete 180 from Wilson’s first genre film as well. The actor, who plays a devoted and heroic father in the new movie, won praise for 2005’s Hard Candy, in which he plays Jeff, an unsavory photographer in his 30s who brings a teenaged girl (Ellen Page in her breakout role) he’s met on-line to his house for a picture-taking session, only for her to torturously turn the tables on him. For Wilson, who got started on the stage, it was also a change of pace from his previous big-scale features. “The two movies I had done prior to that—well, three, including Angels in America on HBO—were The Phantom of the Opera and The Alamo, and both of those had huge budgets,” he notes. “So the fact that they said, ‘We’re going to shoot this movie for under $1 million in 18, 19 days’—wow, can you even do that? And it felt like a play. Once I met with [director] David Slade, who I love, and saw Ellen’s audition tape, I thought, ‘Man, this could be really, really cool.’ It was very daring and a real challenge, but I had never done anything like that before, and I’m always up for something new.”
Hard Candy presented Wilson with a different physical challenge than Byrne faced on 28 Weeks, as his character is physically immobilized for a large part of the running time. The key, he recalls, was, “How do you keep the action moving forward when you’re confined? There are a number of plays, like Extremities and Death and the Maiden, where you’ve got the predator and the prey confined to a house, and I love those. When they work, they’re extremely powerful. You’ve got to have a good sparring partner, and when you don’t have the showier part, it makes you try that much harder—with your eyes, with your mouth—to really get all that emotion out. It was taxing, but I loved doing that movie.”
The characterization had its tricky side as well, since even though what Jeff is doing is obviously inappropriate, there’s still an element of “Is he or isn’t he?” that runs throughout the movie, and viewers don’t know quite how bad a person he is until the end. “I liked that,” Wilson says. “I have to know what kind of person someone is when I’m playing him, but here I thought, ‘Man, on the page he’s so unlikable, he’s very creepy, and it would be cool to try to make people feel for him. And if I can do that, I will have succeeded.’ Because he is not a good guy at all! So I love it when people go, ‘Oh, I was really pulling for you!’ [Laughs] It’s great. And I liked the complexity of Ellen’s role as well.
“That movie was not unlike Insidious,” he continues. “That would have been a different movie if we had been given more time and more money. But there’s something that sometimes works—and I’ve done other small movies where it hasn’t—but on Insidious and Hard Candy, the story supported the budget, the budget supported the story, and we were able to do it without sacrificing anything. It made everyone focus in and do their jobs, because we didn’t have a lot of time. And that was exciting.”
