Claire Foy (‘All of Us Strangers’): This story of love and loss ‘was like a real stab in the heart’ [Exclusive Video Interview]
“I thought the script was really beautiful,” remembers actor Claire Foy about reading writer-director Andrew Haigh‘s screenplay for “All of Us Strangers.” But she admits that at first she wasn’t sure how they would pull it off, and the filmmaker wasn’t entirely sure either. Ultimately, “I think we discovered that probably the most effective way of telling it was to just be as truthful as possible and to believe every moment.” Watch our exclusive video interview with Foy above.
“All of Us Strangers” follows Adam (Andrew Scott), a screenwriter whose parents (Foy and Jamie Bell) died 30 years ago in a car accident. But one day he revisits his former family home and discovers them alive and well and seeming not to have aged a day since he last saw them. Are they ghosts? A figment of his imagination? The key for Foy was to fully commit to the material “even though you didn’t quite know what the physical context was and have to surrender your kind of logical side of your brain to it in a way.” What mattered most “was them just being in a room together again for the first time in 30 years.”
Foy’s character “was a very honest portrayal of a mother. She wasn’t perfect. And so I was very interested in playing that.” The actress “learned on the way … how grief-stricken his mother was about not having had that time with him and not having had the chance to get to know her son.” So the mourning runs both ways in this tragic parent-child dynamic. “He was robbed of having his parents, but they were also robbed of having the chance to get to know their wonderful child … that feeling that she’d been left out in some way, I suppose, or that she wasn’t really part of his life. She didn’t really know him. And that was like a real stab in the heart.”
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