The scene that almost broke Mira Sorvino: “I can’t do this any longer”
Fans of Woody Allen, and I mean his films, not his personal life, will know Mira Sorvino for one thing and one thing only: in 1995, she played Linda Ash, the biological mother of Allen’s character’s adopted son in Mighty Aphrodite.
For her hilarious and moving portrayal of a woman left behind by life, the star was rewarded with praise and awards by the bucketful, but she should have been given a separate award for having to put up with Allen for as long as she did.
Outside of her Oscar-winning association with a very dodgy man, Sorvino has a number of other great parts to her name, one of which is Amy Whelan, the female lead in the BBC America series Intruders.
The life of Amy and her family is turned upside when she becomes possessed by the spirit of a dead woman named Rose, and it’s up to her husband Jack, played by John Simm, to restore his wife’s soul while also going head-to-head with a mysterious cult; not a bad premise, but sadly, not one that was executed particularly well either.
Despite a writing and directing team whose past projects included The Blair Witch Project and The X-Files, Intruders was cancelled after just one season. It might not have provided a long-term payday, but Sorvino was still touched by the show, where she explained to The Guardian, one scene in the series provided her with “one of the greatest acting challenges of my life”.
“‘I’m lying on the floor, crying in a pool of blood,” she recalled, “Finally, I just said, ‘Please, let this be the last take, I can’t do this any longer’. Afterwards, I just rocked on the floor for five minutes; I was so upset by it.”
I would love to give you more context about this scene, but it is nigh-on impossible to find any substantial information about this show online that not only last for just eight episodes, but there are also several other releases from around this same time with very similar names. For instance, do you want the horror movie starring Clive Owen? A different horror movie starring Miranda Cosgrove? A South Korean film starring Squid Game’s Jeon Seok-ho? I could go on.
One thing I can tell you is that Intruders features a very young Millie Bobby Brown playing a young girl whose body gets overtaken by the soul of a serial killer, and between this and playing Eleven at such a young age, it’s a wonder she ever wanted to act again. This was only her second credited role on television, having previously appeared as a young version of Lewis Caroll’s Alice on Once Upon a Time.
Sorvino has been through some pretty harrowing things across her career, both on set and in real life. For her to put working on Intruders up with the hardest things she’s ever done speaks volumes to the power of that particular scene; if only it hadn’t been on something that barely anybody saw.
