by Steven Prokopy
Irish-born Aisling Franciosi (born of Irish and Italian parents) dives headfirst into the role of Clare in the harrowing new film THE NIGHTINGALE, from Australian writer/director Jennifer Kent (THE BABADOOK). Set in 1825 Australia—which was still primarily a penal colony filled with the worst male criminals from the UK, as well as small number of women who landed there on minor offenses—the movie concerns a young Irish woman who lives there with her husband and newborn child. She is constantly (and not always successfully) fending off the advances of the British officer (Sam Claflin) who oversees a desolate portion of the colony and is long overdue an advancement to a better post. After a series of horrifying incidents involving Clare and her family, the officer leaves the area with Clare in hot pursuit across the untamed Tasmanian wilderness, bent on the most violent kind of revenge she can imagine.
Clare enlists the services of an Aboriginal tracker named Billy (Baykali Ganambarr), who is also marked by trauma from his own violence-filled past at the hands of the British. Although THE NIGHTINGALE is not a horror film in the traditional sense of the term, it does feature some truly horrific moments, as well as fleeting moments of hope and salvation for this unlikely duo.
Before this film, Franciosi had only had only a handful of roles on television and films, including a supporting role in Ken Loach’s JIMMY’S HALL and the series “Legends,” “The Fall,” “Clique,” and most recently “Genius.” But she is probably best known for playing Lyanna Stark, Jon Snow’s birth mother, on two episodes of “Game of Thrones.” THE NIGHTINGALE is only her second feature and her first in a leading role, and it’s hard to imagine a more powerful and grueling performance from any actor in 2019. We spoke to Franciosi back in May when she was in Chicago for the Chicago Critics Film Festival at the Music Box Theatre, where THE NIGHTINGALE opens on Friday, August 16.
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Question: When you first read this screenplay and began to fully take in all that Clare must go through, what make you want to take this role?
Aisling Franciosi: I still don’t think I have a very good answer for this. Honestly, the thing that struck me generally, even before I zeroed in on Clare, was just how much I was feeling for these characters from the get-go, which is really hard to find in a script. I read a lot of scripts, and a lot of the time, you’re reading something and you can see what they’re going for and what they want, and I could make something if this if I had to. But with Jen’s screenplay, so much of the work was done for me. She writes in a very truthful and authentic way. It was so dramatic and empathetic without being melodramatic.
And with Clare, I find resilience and endurance really fascinating. It’s a very underestimated and undervalued form of strength. I didn’t see Clare like this at all, but some people have described her to me as going from meek to Joan of Arc, and I don’t see it that way at all. First of all, she’s already overcome so much. She was probably transported [to Australia] at 13 or 14, served her full sentence, but she’s also enduring all of this abuse and trauma, not because she’s weak—we clearly sees that has the fury and strength to really let loose—but she’s trying to protect her family, her child and her future. That’s why she’s putting up with it, she’s trying to protect this really fragile dream of a future with them. She’s endures because the officer keeps promising her this letter that will give her her life back. I don’t see her as meek; that endurance must be hellish, and she’s just one of the thousands of women and men who lived through this experience before going on to build a nation, essentially.
I never saw her as meek, but there are moments when she’s clearly trying to become invisible so these men will leave her alone.
AF: Yes, it’s a survival instinct. Unfortunately, there are different ways that people exert their means of survival, and for a woman it definitely is to not provoke that kind of harassment and abuse. Also with Hawkins [Claflin’s character], it’s a traumatic response when she’s with him alone. I’m going to just make this as the shortest I can make it or try not to provoke anger in him. She has to be still just to get through it.
In the course of your own research on this time and place, did you discover anything that you were able to use to fully form this character?
AF: The extend of the injustice really stood out for me. These women, if they were raped, which they probably were very frequently, by their so-called masters, if they got pregnant when they were in prison, their baby was taken away from them and nothing happened to the man. That’s just the epitome of a type of slavery, and now they’re being punished for not being able to get out of a horrific situation, and nothing is happening to these perpetrators. That was something that I got quite angry about, as well as the systematic abuse and injustice. I didn’t realize how planned it was to populate the island by putting these women there. There were definitely criminals who deserved to be sent there, but there were also a lot of people who stole food to survive or clothes to stay warm and found themselves in hell on earth. That’s something as well that gets to me and rings an alarming bell even today that women are so much more than just populators.
Part of your research was meeting with women who had suffered various forms of trauma and had PTSD. Were there key things you wanted to include in your performance to honor what those women endured?
AF: There were physical things, definitely. She’s always on guard, always. And the only moments when she’s not are when she starts to unravel a bit. When she sees the animal that Billy has killed for dinner, she sees this little dead creature and she’s exhausted, so she’s not on guard and she just breaks into sobbing. For her to keep going, there has to be this physical readiness in her to keep going, to never let her guard down emotionally or physically. If she stopped for any amount of time to take stock in what had happened to her, I think she would spiral into nothing, wanting to die. Even when I was talking to one of the victims in particular, I did notice these things—and it’s different for everyone I’m sure—like you said, some people choose to become more invisible. With Clare, she has to seem way more ferocious than she feels in that moment.
With Billy—it may be hard to understand today, but at the time Clare would have been terrified of him because she’d heard all of these stories about the Aboriginals, so going into the forrest with him would have been terrifying. But then there’s the shift you see when she’s around Hawkins, her abuser, and that was a huge part of the PTSD too—the survival instincts kick in but also, you see her become quite small in front of him and she freezes, and that’s why she can’t take a shot at him. There were physical things, for sure, but everything that happens to Clare with her PTSD, one woman I met described to me. She had thoughts about poisoning her husband, because she was married to her abuser, or killing herself.
Why do you think this story from the 1800s has relevance today? Why tell this story now?
AF: I think there are a few reasons we tell this story now and as a period piece. I believe that for countries to really move forward in healing their nation, they have to acknowledge in the cold light of day what their ancestors did. And I think Australia for a while hasn’t been amazing at doing that, but they’re getting to the point where that’s changing. So from that point of view, it’s a great time to tell this story. But also, there are definitely similarities to today unfortunately. In such a huge scope, there is still so much violence against women. There are still stories happening today that are exactly like Clare’s, stories of women having their babies thrown on fires. War and rape go hand in hand all the time now. But even in our more “modernized” Western society, women are more than baby-making machines and they shouldn’t be punished just for being the feminine. That’s alarmingly coming to the forefront of our conversations at the moment—that being a female puts you on the back foot.
There’s also a story about diversity, about two people coming together who are totally different but have a lot of hatred for each other without even knowing each other. It’s these engrained ideas that we have about one another. That’s very much something we haven’t dealt with globally, and I think it’s important to talk about it. The message of the movie is that we are so much more alike than we are different, and if we stopped this perpetual cycle of violence and just talk, really talk, that we’d realize that there’s a human being there. At the very least, if we get to the point where we respect the human life that’s there, we can make some genuine progress.
That’s genius of the screenplay. Jennifer could have written Billy as simply a local tracker, but instead, he’s a fully formed character with his own trauma, which is not dissimilar from Clare’s. The both had everything take away from them in an instant. Tell me about your working relationship with Sam, because working on so many physically and emotionally difficult scenes together must have been a challenge.
AF: Yeah, we realized pretty quickly…well, the first time I met Sam, we just chatted a bit in Jen’s garden, and that was it. But when we did our first improv, he scared the hell out of me at one point at a moment I wasn’t expecting, and I realized “There’s Hawkins.” So I said to Jen, “There’s no way in hell I can do these scenes unless we’re really close,” and that’s not just for me but for him. There is no part of Sam that is like Hawkins, so for him, sometimes you find yourself thinking thoughts and you say, “That was pretty dark.” As an actor in that position, you have to put yourself in mindset that is really dark all the time, and that’s scary to have to do, and for him, he knew that would be a challenge because Hawkins is terrible, horrendous. I won’t lie, shooting those scenes is really hard and I find it really hard not to be upset between takes. Obviously, he felt terrible. And I wasn’t upset with him; we were both doing this to tell this story as truthfully as possible, but he would always come up and ask if I was okay and hugging me. It was hard for him, but he was incredibly supportive.
In addition to the obvious emotional toll this role might take, physically it looks like it would have been exhausting to be in this film. This terrain you’re going across does not look forgiving. Have you ever done anything this physically challenging before?
AF: No. THE NIGHTINGALE was a first for me in so many ways. I’ve never had a role like it, I was never the lead in a project, I was never in something every single day—I think I had one or two days where I wasn’t involved. I was very fit; that was something I knew I had to do because I knew this was going to be a long stretch. We were going to be in inhospitable locations, I had to be horse riding, and muskets weight a ton—they are unbelievably heavy—so being on a horse with a musket, forget it [laughs]. So I always fine that the more exercise I do and the fitter I am, the more easily more physical things come to me. Even wood chopping, it was all physical. As an actor, you not only have to embody the character and be emotionally engaged, but there are so many technical things you have think about too, and I found that being fit really helped me get through the shoot. But honestly, by the end of it, I was completely exhausted.
Looking back at this experience, how did being a part of this make you a different person than you were before you did it?
AF: I would have considered myself an empathetic person anyway, but after the whole experience…and it wasn’t just because of the people we got in touch with in preparation for the film; people on set shared stories with me to get me to the place emotionally that I needed to go, and I was blown away that they had been through something so awful but they were so lovely and cheery and came to work everyday with a smile on their faces. It made me realize that empathy is incredibly important and connects you so much to another person. Also, everyone has their own narrative and has some form of their own trauma—it might not be like Clare’s or Billy’s, but there are people who have so much going on. It’s important not to make assumptions about people’s pain or lack there of.
As an actor, I definitely learned that being able to do something wholeheartedly—everything in, all guns blazing—if I can continue to do that, I find it liberating because I’m at this point now—I mean, we finished filming two years ago—where if people love it, I’m happy obviously, but even when they don’t, I find I’m really not affected by it. I’m unbelievably proud. I know that I literally couldn’t have given any more, so I’m cool with what we did and why we did it. It’s really liberating to come out of a project, whether it turns out the way you wanted it to or not, and to get rid of the horrible, negative voices in your head knowing you gave everything. There’s none of me thinking “Maybe people would have liked it if I’d given more.” That’s a really valuable lesson as an actor because you can’t control what people think of what you do.
Do you know what you’re doing next?
AF: I’m not sure if I’m supposed to say it, but I’m doing a limited series that hasn’t been announced yet, and I’m hoping to get a really cool indie film work out too.
Best of luck with this. Thank you so much.
AF: Thanks.
Steve Prokopy is the chief film critic for the Chicago-based arts outlet Third Coast Review (www.ThirdCoastReview.com). For nearly 20 years, he was the Chicago Editor for Ain’t It Cool News, where he contributed film reviews and filmmaker/actor interviews under the name “Capone.”