Hi, Martha, lovely to meet you, I'm good, how are you?
Very well, thank you. It's lovely to meet you, too.
So could you tell us a little bit
about your character and who you play in many ways?
Oh, oh, I play Gail,
who's one half of a couple
who've lost a child
several years before this film takes place.
And she's still not past it, or at least she's not
she's not sure if she wants to get past it, I should say.
And so during the course of the film,
she finds herself taking in, listening a lot to the people
across the table from her, and something happens to her
that she's very surprised by and possibly can explain,
but it changes her. And that's
that's my character.
And as an actor,
what was it that attracted you to the script when you first read it?
I love the script. It was unlike anything I'd ever read before.
I thought it was incredibly brave.
It was meticulous.
It had clearly been written with great care
and a great consciousness, not only in the subject matter,
but of what it means to perform something like this
and what it means for a person who's been through this and to watch it.
It was clearly written by someone
with an enormous amount of empathy and also skill.
And to me, it was a masterful screenplay
that I finished in one sitting, which is pretty rare for me.
I mean, what is it that you think you would like audiences
to take away from your character's journey throughout this film?
I think not just from my character's journey, but I think from the whole
the whole journey of the film itself, because, of course,
we're all you know, we're we're we're a quartet.
You know, it's not the same without any one of us.
And so and in a way, it's,
you know, maybe a quintet because of Fran [Kranz], our director and our writer,
I think I want I don't know
if I want anything, but I hope that people will take away
that it's possible that it's possible
to move past division,
the the the incredible alienation and anger.
It's possible to move past all of that.
And hopefully the door cracks
open a little bit so you can begin the process of forgiveness.
That's lovely. And when you first read the script, was it
an easy, quick decision or was it something you had to think more?
No, it was pretty quick.
I read it and then I think not long
after I got to meet Fran, who wrote it.
I mean, I, I felt like if someone had written something
this beautiful, then they must be special.
They must be someone smart who has an insight or something or
a natural empathy. That is.
And things like this don't come along all the time.
I thought, you know, as an actor, this is what you dream of. You dream of
a filmmaker giving you this kind of role, this kind of experience.
And then when I met Fran and all of that was confirmed, I knew that
he wanted to do that with us and he wanted to hand over his story to us.
And because of the subject matter and how emotionally intense it is, was it
something that was easy
to leave at the door at the end of the day filming, or was it
something you kind of carried with you after you'd finished for the day?
Well, I don't want to sound glib, but
we had such a short period of time to film this,
and we had bonded so quickly that we were kind of laughing all the way through.
We were able to let it go.
And, you know, when we did finish a take of 15 pages or 20 pages
and be like 10 or 20 minute takes,
we were able to kind of. You had to.
You had to. And just
be funny and
Reed Birney's one of the funniest people alive, you know.
So it was like that.
It wasn't it wasn't this kind of, oh, you know,
I must leave me alone, you know, kind of thing.
It was very was very relaxed and we were very part of one another.
You know, we were all sort of noticing one another's ebbs and flows.
And so we didn't really have any of those issues.
Amazing. Thank you so much you so much.
I appreciate it. Thank you.