Advertisement

Movies & TV News & Features

Q&A: Sarah Gadon

At the age of 10, Sarah Gadon appeared in an episode of Nikita. The Toronto native hasn’t really stopped working since, growing up on camera in shows like Mutant X, The Border and Being Erica and movies like Charlie Bartlett and Leslie, My Name Is Evil.

Gadon’s career stepped up several levels when David Cronenberg cast her in his back-to-back productions of A Dangerous Method and Cosmopolis opposite Michael Fassbender and Robert Pattinson, respectively. We sat down at the Toronto Film Festival the day after A Dangerous Method’s Canadian premiere to discuss working with Fassbender, the fashions of Old Europe and how a good corset can help an actor find her character.

A Dangerous Method takes place almost a century ago, in a European world that’s radically different from today’s. How did you get into character?

When you’re working on a film like A Dangerous Method, that kind of character transformation begins when your dressers knock on your trailer door. You have two women come in to dress you. And I think that’s really important to who you are a woman like Emma Jung would have had a dresser. She would have had her hair done before she left for Vienna to visit Freud. It’s a part of the pastiche, it’s a part of the character and the landscape of the film.

Cronenberg said that the fashions of the time expressed the repressed nature of European society, which led to very precise posture and movements. Did you find that to be so?

I’ve studied dance since I was very young, and I continue to study ballet. There are positions in ballet where you have very distinct conversations about corsets, and how corsets created body positions – how body positions affected how you moved and danced. So that’s something that’s always been in the forefront of my mind. Movement is very important to a character, no matter what period you’re working in. So when it came to playing Emma Jung and lacing up in the corset, it was really not a foreign thing for me.

And then you’re shooting for hours in a corset.

When you’re in a very specific kind of wardrobe, it kind of dictates your movement it also kind of enables you – or, I guess, disables you – from certain kinds of movement. When you’re wearing a corset for a long period of time, things that were important to you hours before are no longer important. [laughing] Because doing them exhausts you.

You share most of your screen time with Michael Fassbender, who’s building quite a reputation as an electric, focused performer. What was that like?

David doesn’t rehearse, which really requires you to be very open to listening. Because, you know, all of the preparation that I do is fine, but then you kinda have to swallow that and just be present with Michael, and with what he’s giving you and what he’s doing within the scene. I think the sensitivity that Michael brought to the character influenced how I was going to play Emma. On the day, I had a lot of sympathy for him in scenes. When I read the script, I knew I was approaching Emma from the sense that she understood the ground-breaking significance of [Jung’s] work and was very open-minded and liberal and intelligent – she later became an analyst herself – but in their private life, in their domestic relationship, she was coming from a very traditional Swiss-German background. Those things were in play, and then having Michael there being so kind of quiet and sensitive just allowed me to be even more compassionate toward him.

And then you and Cronenberg shifted gears completely for Cosmopolis, which is set in pre-9/11 Manhattan.

[Laughing] Dangerous Method and Cosmopolis are entirely different. Cosmopolis is modernist, but it almost has this futuristic kind of feel – it’s also going to be David’s first digital film. Yeah. So it’s going to be very, very different.

Was it easier to start into Cosmopolis having worked with Cronenberg on A Dangerous Method? Or were the projects roughly the same, in terms of the challenge?

A Dangerous Method was really daunting. I was terrified, you know, as the fifth lead with Viggo [Mortensen] and Keira [Knightley] and Michael [and Vincent Cassel]. I didn’t sleep at all during the shooting of the film. So going into Cosmopolis was a little more relaxing. I knew what the process was going to be like I knew there was nothing to worry about. I’d never even met David before I stepped on set for A Dangerous Method, so I had a lot of anxiety and anticipation about what he would be like as a filmmaker, because… look at his films, and the kind of work he creates. I mean, I have no idea what it takes to get that! So I was really nervous. Cosmopolis was just… everything was better, everything was more at ease, everything was great.

normw@nowtoronto.com

Advertisement

Exclusive content and events straight to your inbox

Subscribe to our Newsletter

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

By signing up, I agree to receive emails from Now Toronto and to the Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.