
Rebecca De Mornay Had Great Reaction to Hand That Rocks the Cradle Remake, Talks Saint Clare
Saint Clare star Rebecca De Mornay spoke to ComingSoon about her role in the new horror movie. De Mornay discussed working with Bella Thorne, her thoughts on the upcoming The Hand That Rocks the Cradle remake, and more. The psychological thriller is out now in theaters, on demand, and on digital.
“In a small town, a solitary woman is haunted by voices that lead her to assassinate ill-intended people and get away with it, until her last kill sucks her down a rabbit hole riddled with corruption, trafficking, and visions from the beyond,” says the synopsis.
Tyler Treese: There’s a great dinner scene in Saint Clare, where your character recounts your career as an actor and you get to do this little stage fight with Bella. What stood out about filming that scene? Because it’s really the first time we meet your character and really get to see her personality.
Rebecca De Mornay: Yeah, I think it’s a wonderful introduction to a character.
You first see her smoking a joint, you know, cooking in the kitchen, and we establish her as this free spirit. I’ll do what I want. And then, you know, launching into this this little speech about old Hollywood while she’s drinking wine, that how much stronger the female roles were back then.
First of all, I didn’t know that. So I really learned a lot then talked to different people who were more knowledgeable, so that was fascinating to me. But it was a great way of introducing the character with her smoking the joint, cooking, talking about Hollywood, and you could see how much she cared about women being empowered. And then, you know, launching into her own career which actresses are prone to do [laughs].
So we saw like the whole gamut somehow, and those two little scenes, like of who she is, which I thought was really well done.
Throughout the film, you wind up having some really emotional scenes, especially when the character’s talking about losing her own daughter and not wanting to go through that again. They’re very intense, and as a viewer, you can really feel the character’s pain. How was it really just fully giving into the emotion when you were recording?
That’s sweet of you to ask. That is what they pay me to do [laughs].
I really love that scene. It’s a great scene for the movie because you see for the first time a kind of helpless fear in Gigi when she starts to realize something is going on that’s beyond Gigi’s control. That is scary. That is worrisome.
So that’s kind of a great new arc. Seeing Gigi worried not just, like, “I can deal with it,” but, “I have two daughters that are in their twenties,” and it really had this weight of a parent with a kid that we hadn’t really seen in the film before. Where she really discarded her narcissistic, red wine drinking, like, “this is my life,” and it’s great. Where she became a truly concerned parent, then reminded of probably why she became who she became when having to lose her daughter.
I can’t even imagine losing a daughter, but she lost her daughter, and she was clinging onto this granddaughter, and now, you know, it reawakened her into the tragedy that happened, and she was fearing having almost a premonition that it could happen again. So it’s a well-written scene.
I was really also impressed by just Bella’s overall performance. I feel like this is one of the most complex roles she’s gotten, and she’s definitely up for it. How was she as a scene partner? I know you were talking about your characters, like talking about how complex roles for women became harder to come by, and I thought that was very fitting, to then see Bella in such a complex role.
Right, right. I think that I think that Bella did a really, really good job. You know, it was a complex and difficult role. But she brought to it something that was unexpected, which is this very, very quiet quality, which I hadn’t really expected reading the script. Very, very quiet.
And yet the quiet was completely filled with a depth. In other words, a lot of times when people go quiet, there’s this sort of emptiness underneath. You sense a quiet, but it’s always filled with something that you don’t know what it’s filled with, but you can see it’s filled. And that I really liked that. I really, I really admired how she played that part.
Yeah, it’s such an interesting performance. And I love asking actors about their early roles, and I was watching One From The Heart a couple months ago, and I saw you’re listed as an understudy. That’s very common in theatre, but I’d never seen that listed for a film. What’s the story there? How did you wind up credited in the Francis Ford Coppola film?
Rebecca De Mornay: That was the very first thing. I became an intern before Risky Business at Francis Ford Coppola’s studio that he was creating called Zoetrope. And to that end, he cast his main cast and one from the heart, and then he cast understudies for the six major parts. I had to audition in the Nastassja Kinski role, and I got it.
And then I was in acting class at the time at Lee Strasberg’s, and people said, “What do you mean you’re an understudy? What? Nastassja is sick one day, and then you’re gonna be on screen, like, what are you talking about?” But I said, “I don’t care. I’m doing it. This is great.”
But when we got there, Screen Actors Guild put a kibosh on it because he wanted to actually shoot the entire film on video with the understudies and cut it together and see if it worked, and then do rewriting if necessary.
But SAG wouldn’t let him and said, “If you shoot them, you need to pay them SAG minimum.” And he said, “But they’re not gonna be on camera.” And SAG said, “Yeah, they are because you’re gonna be filming them, so they’re on camera.” He said, “But they’re not gonna be in the movie.” And they said, “No.”
So then he actually couldn’t afford it. So then I became a stand-in. And so then I became just a stand-in for Nastassja in the five-month shoot of that film. But he gave me — and I’ll love him to death forever — Coppola gave me my SAG card because in a scene with Terry Garr and Raul Julia. He puts me in the restaurant and I say, “Excuse me, those are my waffles,” as they’re going by on a tray. I don’t know if you noticed that gem of a performance where I say, “Excuse me, those are my waffles.” But that’s why my name is there.
They’re doing a remake of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, your fantastic 1992 film. They seem to be remaking everything now, but how do you feel, if anything, when you see one of your original works being repurposed? Is that flattering? How do you feel?
The first feeling was dismay, like, very perturbed. “How dare you. You cannot be remaking this. I created this role,” and that was short-lived. Then I realized, well, number one, I realized that there’s such a lack of imagination right now in Hollywood that there’s so few… You probably are a movie buff, but if you think about the movies of the seventies, where there was just so much creativity of all different kinds of stories, movies that weren’t about movies that are gonna make money, and you can do a sequel and another sequel.
But somehow or other, slowly we’ve morphed into monetizing, just thinking about movies as how much is the box office gonna be. It didn’t used to be that way. So on the one hand, they’re falling back on, “Well, that was a hit. Let’s make that movie again but with a new cast,” which is kind of lame. But on the other hand, when something is good, [and] I keep saying this: A Star Is Born. It’s been made three times, I think.
People will go back and revisit the original as well.
Yeah, exactly, and they’re different. I love each version. I mean, I remember loving Barbara Streisand in the other one and the other, the original one. Bradley Cooper’s is amazing, you know, so I hope this new team making Hand That Rocks The Cradle know what they’re doing, ’cause ours was really good.
Thanks to Rebecca De Mornay for taking the time to talk about Saint Clare.
Source: Comingsoon.net