“I got a weird vibe off him”: Helena Bonham Carter’s issues with Lars Von Trier
Most aspiring actors in the midst of rising up the ranks in a cutthroat industry would seize the chance to work with one of cinema’s most distinctive auteurs with both hands, but Helena Bonham Carter won’t collaborate with anyone unless they pass a vibe check.
Since making her screen debut in the mid-1980s, Bonham Carter made a concerted effort to break away from being repeatedly cast in the period pieces that defined the early years of her career, and as a result, she ended up working with a litany of top-tier filmmakers across all genres.
Woody Allen, Paul Greengrass, David Fincher, Mike Newell, Tom Hooper, Gore Verbinski, and her multiple features alongside former partner Tim Burton covered drama, thrillers, horror, and mysteries, without mentioning her riotously exuberant recurring turn as Bellatrix Lestrange in the Harry Potter franchise.
She’s never been the type to sign on for any old project that comes her way, though, and that extends to the people who make them. While Bonham Carter is happy to meet with anyone to discuss potential parts in their upcoming productions, her approach to whether to say yes or no is rooted in the age-old belief that first impressions really do matter.
“There has to be a chemistry between you and a director,” she told The Guardian. “And Lars Von Trier struck me as a bit of a weirdo. I got a weird vibe off him, so it was never going to work. You have to be able to trust people, or what’s the point in spending time in their company?”
Bonham Carter was the director’s first choice to play Bess McNeill in Breaking the Waves, his 1996 romantic drama about a devoutly religious woman in a remote Scottish coastal town who ends up being encouraged by her partner to have sex with other people after he’s paralysed in an accident.
Needless to say, there’s plenty of explicit scenes, nudity, and eroticism required, and while Emily Watson ended up earning an Academy Award nomination for her work in the film, Bonham Carter harbours no regrets after deciding that signing up with Von Trier wasn’t the sort of professional relationship she was interested in forging.
Not that she’s the only person to brand Von Trier as being a strange fellow, with the provocateur’s entire career having been no stranger to controversy. Whether it’s the content of his features, comments he’s made, or allegations of animal cruelty and misconduct, the maverick Dane has never been regarded as one of cinema’s shrinking violets.
Bonham Carter decided that Breaking the Waves wasn’t something she wanted to be a part of, which is fair enough when it’s not conducive to a working environment to have the proposed star finding themselves put off by the person wielding the megaphone.
