The Orphan Cast Interview

MoviesOnline sat down with Peter Sarsgaard, Vera Farmiga, and Isabelle Fuhrman to talk about their new movie, Orphan, directed by Jaume Collet-Serra (“House of Wax”) from a screenplay by David Leslie Johnson and a story by Alex Mace.

The tragic loss of their unborn child has devastated Kate (Vera Farmiga) and John (Peter Sarsgaard), taking a toll on both their marriage and Kate's fragile psyche as she is plagued by nightmares and haunted by demons from her past. Struggling to regain some semblance of normalcy in their lives, the couple decides to adopt another child. At the local orphanage, both John and Kate find themselves strangely drawn to a young girl named Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman)...but Esther is not what she appears to be and, concerned for the safety of her family, Kate tries to get John and others to see past Esther's sweet facade. But her warnings go unheeded until it may be too late...for everyone.
Peter Sarsgaard, Vera Farmiga, and Isabelle Fuhrman turn in terrific performances in “Orphan” and we really appreciated their time. Here’s what they had to tell us about their recent collaboration:

Q: Isabelle, did you stay in character between scenes? How did this work because you were scary.

Isabelle: Thank you. I could dip in and out of character but I mainly stayed in character during the week. When I had days off, I would monkey around like I am (laughs). Sometimes I’d go and talk to Vera and Peter about advice on acting because they’re just amazing actors and I’m new to this.

Q: What was it like playing someone so evil?

Isabelle: A lot of fun. (Laughs) A lot of fun, but it was challenging playing someone evil because I’m so different from that.

Q: Did you worry about keeping this character after you were through shooting this movie?

Isabelle: Not really because I’m really different than my character. I’m really very different. I’m not evil at all. I promise you that. I go to school. I mean, all my friends are really excited for me so it’s been great.

Q: For all of you, how did this end up in your lap and were you intrigued from the outset? It’s a pretty intense horror movie. What was your main attraction to the material?

Vera: The story. For me, it was the story. I’d never read anything like it. I loved the genre. It’s very rare to find characters that you can really believe in and want to invest in. I found what my character was going through, which is this miscarriage, and I found that very compelling. It’s such a complex grief. And the dysfunction of this family, I was in it. Then, really, it was just a matter of who was going to be a part of it and that was the deciding factor for me.

Q: Did you make this after you had your baby?

Vera: No, right before it.

Q: This and Joshua right before?

Vera: Yeah. Mothers in distress.

Q: Peter, what drew you to the material?

Peter: When I got it, her name was already floating out there. I mean, Vera is not only an actress that is like… I remember seeing Vera in kind of I guess the first break through movie that I’m aware of that she did which was Down to the Bone at Sundance and just going “Oh my God, we’ve been waiting for an actress that could…” And since then, I’d always just wanted to do anything with her and when I read this, I thought “Well, that would be very interesting.” We’re friends and to be these dysfunctional lovers, I thought that would be very …

Vera: Weird and fun.

Peter: …weird and interesting and weird because you’re friends with my wife also and I thought this is going to be bizarre where this is going.

Q: What about you, a very intelligent actor, playing a character as clueless as this one?

Peter: I see his intelligence off screen. His intelligence is his work, I’m sure. I mean, certainly isn’t it almost like the most commonplace thing in a man that around his house you could get so into this routine where you just wanted everything to stay at this decibel and if somebody got upset, you just went, “Ah, ah, hang on.” You’re kind of just keeping it all right here so that if you had an office in that building, which I do and I can go downstairs and work, just to keep everyone happy. “Oh that’s great. Your gerbil died? That’s awesome. Oh you said it died? You should probably have somebody give it a funeral.” Like, you know, just to keep everything going in a nice, easy way. I very much identify with that. I’m sure many of you do as well.

Q: Vera, as an actress, you’re obviously very accustomed to melding the physicality of a role with the memorization of lines. Does that skill translate into learning the sign language? How was that as a performance tool?

Vera: Well it wasn’t a tremendous effort. We went pretty quickly after the whole thing came together so there wasn’t much pre-production but Aryana Engineer was hard of hearing and we wanted to just have the easiest and fullest communication so we all dabbled as much as we could in trying to learn the language beforehand. And then, we could communicate with her just by speaking very loudly and gesticulating madly. The sign language was …

Peter: She was the most into it. I mean, to be honest.

Vera: I think I was too but Isabelle went far beyond me. Once I realized I could speak really loudly, I just focused on the script making sure the script was accurate.

Peter: But you were the initial catalyst. You were very focused on learning it. You totally took off and I was way behind. But I think there’s sort of an interesting thing about that in the movie too. I do sign in the movie but, you know, my connection to my family is pretty remote in that way. You know, you just find yourself doing things as you would. I got less focused on sign language. (to Isabelle) You got the most focused on sign language which makes sense because you’ve got to talk to her and become her confidante.

Vera: As it becomes important for your character, it was crucial for my relationship with my daughter in the film to have that communication that you don’t quite see with the father or her brother. So yeah, that was an important aspect that I relished and I loved learning.

Q: Isabelle, are you allowed at the age of 12 to see movies like this in theaters?

Isabelle: Not other movies, but this movie I’m allowed to see but my sister is going to be sitting next to me at the premiere and during some scenes that Vera and Peter have she’s going to go like this. [hands over her eyes] She’s going to have the eyes covered. (Laughs)

Peter: They’re going to do that for me too.

Isabelle: And I’m going to be like, “Is it over yet?” And she’ll be like, “Almost.”

Vera: She, in fact, was not present during that scene.

Isabelle: No.

Vera: It’s a trick of the camera where you think your character’s actually there…

Peter: Oh, that scene.

Vera: …but you’re not.

Peter: No.

Q: So, your choice of films is under some family control?

Isabelle: It’s mainly up to me. The challenge that I saw when I read the script was very large. The challenge of playing a conflicted, complex character who can be happy one moment and then turn her head and just be thinking of a diabolical plan of something to do. What will be next on the list to check off that can make this family even more miserable.

Peter: I have to say, I think a lot of the stuff that you did in the movie for any actor, no matter how experienced, doing it in dialect, talking ad nauseum, always playing at least three things, I mean, would have been, you know… I have those days when I come to work and I see a scene like that and you get sick to your stomach when I realize “Oh man!” You had that like almost every day.

Isabelle: It was challenging but it was a lot of fun. I had such a great time and it was such a great experience and I really learned a lot from this, from Vera and Peter and from Jaume (Jaume Collet-Serra, the director). I learned a lot about myself through this like I can do it. I can actually do this.

Q: Jaume indicated that maybe in some of the more intense scene that it wasn’t you and that it would only be close-ups of you and he did not ask you to do a lot of the stuff. Is that true?

Isabelle: It’s very true. Yeah. I did a lot of stunts in the movie but a lot of the scenes… (Laughs) CCH Pounder was amazing in those scenes we did. It was really funny. We were laughing in between these scenes. We were like, “Oh you look really funny. You’ve got the little scar there. That’s really funny. What does it feel like, all the prosthetic stuff?” And she’d be like, “It’s kind of itchy and kind of funny.” It was just a lot of fun. Everything. It was like Halloween. Of course, I’d never do this in real life. Never. Never, never, never. But it’s fun to play evil. It’s fun. It’s very fun.

Q: How did you learn to play the piano?

Isabelle: I didn’t learn to play piano. I learned one piece that I play with Vera in one of the scenes and then I learned to fake play piano, this piece, it’s called August Harvest, that I play in the movie.

Peter: It’s all self-explanatory, isn’t it? Honestly.

Isabelle: I went for two days to a composer’s house and he was teaching me how to fake play, like where I could put my fingers on the keys of the piano. Then they had my hand double who was my age. I think she was 13. She was a year older than me, two years older than me when I filmed the movie. She knew the piece and she was playing and I was like “Whoa!”

Vera: A virtuoso.

Isabelle: Wow. I was like I can fake play. I can’t play it but I can fake play it.

Peter: And Vera does play the piano quite well.

Q: What was it like working in Toronto in a rather ferocious winter?

Peter: It was ferocious. Well, we didn’t intend for some of those scenes to have quite so much snow in them.

Vera: They weren’t intended to be so …

Peter: I think there was a Halloween scene at one point, wasn’t there, that we had to get rid of because it was just not believable that it would be so snowy.

Vera: But it just added to the oppression of the film.

Q: Are you all fans of the horror genre?

Vera: Very much so.

Peter: You kind of have to be if you’re going to do something like this.

Isabelle: I like watching the trailers. I can’t do the movies. I’m always like, “Oh the trailer grossed me out. I’m not going to be able to see the movie.”

Vera: I don’t think you could participate in the film if you weren’t an enormous fan of the genre and loved being scared.

Q: What are some of your favorite all-time horror movies?

Vera: The Tenant, Rosemary’s Baby, Repulsion.

Peter: I have maybe a little bit more low brow: Bad Seed, Omen.

Vera: Omen! Of course, The Omen.

Peter: Bad Seed is so good. Yeah, The Omen, where the news that the child is possessed by the devil. When he gets told, he goes like, “Hmmmm.” It’s like a priest going “And he will …” I just love his reaction of oh well. You learn to love certain horror movies and this is not in that genre for sort of a reaction scene like that. I could personally watch that scene over and over and over just to see -- it’s Gregory Peck, right? -- just to see him go, “Oh God, the child’s possessed by the devil. What are we going to do, honey?”

Q: Vera, your list is all Polanski.

Vera: It was but there’s like Ruth Gordon’s performance in that.

Peter: She’s sells it.

Vera: But again, these kind of films in the genre only work if I’m invested in the characters and find the characters compelling. Often times you want to go see these films but you feel so duped and it’s not scary because you’re not buying into their lives.

Peter: Because they need a witness that’s in the movie that is witnessing the things that are going on and witnesses them in a believable way. Like Ellen Burstyn in The Exorcist is looking at… We all talk about the image of her spinning and throwing up and everything but that’s not what makes you scared. It’s seeing Ellen Burstyn go, “Oh my God!” I really think that sometimes in this genre people put either actors that are not up to it or actors that are dismissive of it and they don’t witness the stuff that is happening. In the end, it’s not about all the goop, it’s about these witnesses to these events and that’s what always draws the audience in. Like I said, when I heard that you were cast doing this, I went “It’s going to be great.”

Q: Was this a different experience for you compared to Joshua?

Vera: Like I say, it is a mother in distress but the characters were suffering from two different ailments. Joshua is a woman who’s going through a post-partum psychosis who does nothing to better her situation. She just wallows in it and goes deeper and deeper. Whereas, my character [in Orphan], who suffered a very complex grief with miscarriage, is trying to heal her family and persevere and seek forgiveness and she’s motivated by the things that she’s done because of alcoholism and she wants to repair their marriage and she wants to fill that hole in her heart. They’re just two completely different stories. Joshua was a great film. I wish more people had seen it.

Q: Isabelle, did your parents have any reservations about you doing this?

Isabelle: No, they were really all for it because I really wanted to do this film. Before I went on the audition, I was talking to my mom and I was like, “If I get this, I really want to do this. I so want to do this.” And she’s like, “Alright, well let’s do it.” So, after I got it, my mom was actually in Africa on a press trip. She’s a journalist. She does Travel & Life Style. She gets a call in the middle of the bush riding an elephant in the morning saying, “Your family needs to speak to you right now.” And my mom’s thinking “What the heck happened? What’s going on?” She picks up the phone [and hears] “She got the part!” and then she’s like, “Oh my Gosh!” So it was very exciting. I was just so happy. After I got the call, I went to my computer. I was doing my homework and my dad says “Why are you doing your homework? You should be celebrating.” I said, “I’m finishing so I can go celebrate.” Hello! (Laughs)

Q: Macaulay Culkin wasn’t allowed to see the full script of The Good Son when he was signed for it. Did they allow you to see the full script?

Isabelle: Yup. I read the full script and all the revisions of it because I really wanted to understand who she was to be able to actually play her. I really needed to become her and think about what she might be feeling in each different situation.

Peter: But there was maybe one scene. Had you read the entirety of the scene between you and I at the end when you come in?

Isabelle: Yes.

Peter: They finally gave you that one? Because remember they were withholding that one.

Isabelle: Yes, but I read it before we did it.

Peter: That one was eleventh hour.

Q: Vera, did the third act impress you? Was the third act reveal on Esther one of the things that attracted you to this script?

Vera: Unquestionably, yes. Absolutely. I howled and I was terrified. I had this really nervous laughter and then I handed it to my husband who’s a good barometer and he was nervously giggling throughout and shrieking the whole time and then there was this enormous whoop and I thought, “Okay, I’ll do it.”

“Orphan” opens in theaters on July 24th.