The role that “completely pummelled” Aubrey Plaza: “It was excruciating”
Acting can completely take it out of you, forcing a performer to reckon with the very core of their being and what it means to be alive.
Having to confront the innate principles of being human through pretending to be another is never going to be easy, but what about when the character you’re playing is part of a bizarre psychological drama?
Aubrey Plaza, known for her eccentric and dry persona, is more often associated with comedy, but she brought a mixture of humour and pathos to her role as Allison in Black Bear, a meta exploration of identity that blurs the lines between what’s real and what’s not.
To fully embody a role as complex, Plaza naturally had to get herself into a rather unusual headspace, but that comes with great difficulty. Getting into the mind of a character that isn’t mentally stable can take its toll, and she admitted to the Irish Times, “More than any movie, this movie completely pummelled me.”
Many actors have found themselves feeling like a shell of themselves when they’ve taken on a particularly tricky part. I mean, Bob Hoskins literally began to hallucinate little animals after filming the half-live action, half-animated Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, having spent the whole of the movie acting opposite no one. The things that can happen as a result of your art really can’t be underestimated.
Shooting a movie is going to be tiring at the best of times, and that’s not even taking physically or mentally strenuous scenes into account. So throw a particularly strange and demanding storyline into the mix, and you’ve got a recipe for pure exhaustion, the kind you can feel pressing down on your bones, even when you lie down.
The mental exhaustion that comes with it can only be equated to getting off the phone with a relative you don’t really like, having heard them tell you all about their trip to Italy and their latest office drama. You sit there, their voice coming out as white noise as you pick at a hangnail or see how many times you can make your ankles click in a row, and all you want to do is just put the receiver down. And when you do, it’s too late – all that’s left is the need to close your eyes and lie down. You’re done.
Well, maybe the mental pain of playing a traumatised character is a little more affecting than that, but you get my drift. It’s pure mental agony. “At the end of the process, I was just this broken-down person,” Plaza said. “It was excruciating. Just to have the stamina to stay in that physical state for so long. There were a lot of things that added to that exhaustion.”
By the end of the shoot, Plaza couldn’t recognise herself anymore. “The circumstances of the shooting. The isolated location. We were shooting nights for three weeks and sleeping during the day and that was for the first half of the film when I was doing a lot of heavy lifting,” she admits. A messed-up sleep schedule will certainly do that to you.
The actor concluded, “And doing a performance on top of her performance on top of the performance. At some point, I became this creepy, weird animal. All of my inhibitions were gone. I was just in survival mode.”
