clarke is BI and so am I

Oh, hmm, I don’t remember seeing any kind of post like that. Did we get any kind of wide angle on that? Aww, I went to rewatch and I guess there is this moment where Toni very visibly kind of drops down a bit after?

Elisa & Marcela

Had you ever worked with Vanessa Kirby before?

No, but I'd watched her in stuff and I didn't want to do this film with anybody else. I just felt it had to be her. And so it was a very good day when she said yes. Mona has a gift for casting, I think. I loved this cast. We are all very different performers and have very different qualities but really worked well together. I think she put together a bunch of people who really like to play scenes like tennis matches. There are basic rules to the thing, there's a structure to the scene, but within that, there's room to play. That's why it was so important to me that it was Vanessa because I really felt like she was someone who was strong enough and creative enough to really play the scenes with me. And the script is just so rich.

I can't imagine you were able to do much research for a story about an LGBTQ relationship in the 19th century. Were you able to dig into the time and what it must have been like?

Yeah, there's very little research you can do because there's so little written about the LGBTQ community of that period, about love stories between two women. There's the Anne Lister diaries, which I pored over while we were working, and there were a few things in there that I found really useful. However, she was a very privileged English woman, and I was playing a farm woman in New England. So there's a great difference there in terms of access, access to education and time, too — time to oneself, time to think and develop your identity. I think Abigail, my character, is a woman whose life was never really her own to choose in any way. There was basically nothing about my life, my experience, that prepared me for playing Abigail, she is of another world. It's fascinating to explore her world, and what her life would have been like. It all starts with the script, and they did a lot of that work for us by creating two women who were just fully-fledged individuals.

What would you say is the tone of the film?

“What did you think of my poems?”

Jinju & Bess

“I don’t think I’ve got it in me to get that scared about something that could be good.”

Portrait of a Lady on Fire. (2019)