Forcefields, fake birth, and tennis balls: the weird world of Yorgos Lanthimos auditions
Yorgos Lanthimos isn’t one to do anything normally.
You don’t need to have seen one of his films to know that he is a purveyor of all things weird, carrying the torch for a new generation of filmmakers preoccupied with the surreal and often violent nature of humanity.
Since the early days of his career, the Greek director has left viewers in a state of shock, presenting uncomfortable truths or simply absurd scenes of life, but it’s because of this that he has become such a stalwart and well-needed part of Hollywood.
You don’t expect someone like Lanthimos to get as popular as he has over the years, but it helps that he has cranked out some pretty wild movies featuring well-known stars, like Emma Stone, in quick succession. They work perfectly together, even if her first audition for him left her confused by his strange approach.
When she auditioned for The Favourite, a part she of course landed, Stone was thrust into Lanthimos’ odd world of unusual acting exercises. “I auditioned for Yorgos, he had me pant like I was giving birth throughout the lines. I think he just does this to everyone,” she explained at a NYFF press conference.
She wasn’t the only one asked to act strangely, though. Nicholas Hoult, who successfully secured a role alongside Stone in the film, also passed Lanthimos’ weird audition: “Yorgos asked me to hum while the person I was with said their lines, and then I had to imagine force fields around the room and sculpt them into things. There were lots of games like that throughout rehearsal as well. I’m not sure how it affects the performance.”
Lanthimos revealed more about his unusual process of rehearsing with his actors in an interview with The Guardian. When preparing for The Favourite, the director had his actors doing the kinds of exercises you can imagine his characters doing for fun in his films.
“They get entangled, and they have to figure out how to get untangled, and while they’re doing that, they might be doing their lines, so the lines get distorted.” By doing so, this can “infuse the scenes and actors with an unpredictability that I find is there in real life, but isn’t there when you sit down and intellectualise a scene or a role,” he explained.
Even Barry Keoghan, who appeared in one of Lanthimos’ earlier English-language films, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, wasn’t immune to the filmmaker’s weird way of working. The actor told LAist, “Yeah, this was a weird audition. Weird film, weird audition. He got us to do these exercises like throwing a tennis ball on the ground, or having a pen [in] your hand and constantly throwing it up in the air. And I was like, ‘Why is he doing that?’ And just say your lines. It’s just all part of distracting us from attaching emotions or feelings to our words and basically getting us to just say it.”
Clearly, if you survive these auditions, then you’ve got what it takes to actually appear in a film as unusual as those that Lanthimos comes up with. Not everyone could surely hack this way of working, but stars like Stone and Hoult seemed to fit right into Lanthimos’ crazy world.
