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Actress Juno Temple may not have a lot in common with her conflicted, extremely disturbed character in Magic Magic, but she did get to experience some of the culture shock for herself while working on the film.
“It really feels like you have been plopped in a place where you have no idea how it works,” she says in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter in Cannes. “Everything was different. It was crazy.”
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In Sebastian Silva‘s dark thriller, Temple plays a young woman named Alicia who gets dragged along on a vacation with her friend’s boyfriend and other friends to an isolated part of Chile. But after witnessing some disturbing things, Alicia starts to unravel, becoming more and more paranoid and delusional.
Temple’s performance is powerful, as she slowly transitions from an average — albeit meek — teen into a fearful, twitchy mess of a person.
Helping her character along in the film, which premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight section of Cannes, is Michael Cera‘s character, a strange American who has been living in Chile.
While their characters are very much at odds during the film, it turns out that Cera was a big ally for Temple as she worked through some of the most difficult scenes and dealt with a bit of culture shock at the same time.
“He was such an amazing support for me,” says the English actress of Cera. “I think when you have a trust with somebody, it’s important to have fun while shooting things like that otherwise it’s going to really f— you up.”
Temple reveals that they all stayed in a farmhouse together during the shoot in Chile, which provided an escape for her.
“At the end of these mad days or nights shooting crazy stuff, you’d get to go home and there’d be this fantastic cooked meal,” she says.
Cera, known for his comedic work in films like Juno and Superbad, plays a character that was originally written as a Chilean, but Cera asked if it could be changed to be an American.
He went as far as to learn Chilean Spanish for the part.
“I went and lived with Sebastian’s family for a few months, which was a pleasure,” Cera tells THR, “just studying there and practicing with them, and getting weirder and weirder.”
Watch THR‘s interview with Temple, Cera and Silva above.
Email: Rebecca.Ford@thr.com; Twitter: @Beccamford
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