In the new film Joyride, an excellent young Charlie Reid plays Mully, a boy on the run after taking the money his father stole and attempting to return it. While the father, played with desperation by Lochlann O'Mearáin, chases after him, one woman gets caught in between — Joy, played by Olivia Colman. Colman is the Oscar-winning actor who seems incapable of a misstep these days, from her work in the dark comedy The Favourite and The Father to last year's The Lost Daughter and this year's Empire of Light. She's as well-known as she is well-awarded.
What her co-stars (and director Emer Reynolds) didn't know, however, was that Colman has a very specific process to acting. After extensive pre-production conversations, research, and thinking, Colman prefers to dive right into a role without too many takes or even rehearsals. It's an approach that can be easily unnerving for actors and directors alike, and while promoting Joyride, her co-stars and director explained how the uneasy style was ultimately worth it.
Olivia Colman Acts in the Moment
"Olivia doesn't do rehearsals, so we don't know what's going to happen when we stand in front of the camera," explained O'Mearáin. "That was slightly terrifying for me, but it was quite liberating [...] You're on the edge, there's no safety net, you have to really let go and let something happen. That's really captivating."
"It was a little surprise to me that she doesn't like to do rehearsals," said Reynolds. "I get that now when I see her, because she's so immediate, she wants it to be live in the moment, with real responses. So our rehearsal periods, as such, was really just us getting to know each other, chatting a little, feeling stuff out." Reynolds, who has only directed documentaries (after an extensive career of film editing), is actually the exact type of director to make something like this work even better than one would imagine. After all, most documentaries aren't rehearsed, and you don't get multiple takes with the truth. "I approached it the same way as I do documentaries — you're trying to get the heart to it, you're trying to get the truth." Reynolds elaborated:
We were just in the moment, and everybody was in that space [...] everyone just trusted each other, and we lived in the present for every scene. It's kind of scary, but very quickly, it seemed to be really right. It was really organic [...] really fresh and vivid. It felt proper, like we're here, it's really happening. Olivia does all of that work before, all of that thinking time, all of that chatting, the work on the accent, and then wants to just be really fresh on the day.
Joyride Takes Colman and Charlie Reid on a Road Trip Dec. 23
Reid spends almost the entirety of the film with Colman's character, and so he experienced these organic interactions more than anyone else. As the two lonely characters traverse the gorgeous Irish countryside, they open up to each other in a way that's very vulnerable for an actor, especially a then-14-year-old like Reid.
"You're going straight into the scene with her, and she doesn't work with any rehearsals, she just asks you to go straight in," said Reid. "I think that it's a weird approach for me because I'm always used to just rehearsing before and then going into it. She just wanted to go straight in to see how it was, see how it flowed, and if it didn't work, do the second take. Looking back at it now, I think it was really great, the way she did that. I really enjoyed it, because it just helped me to be more natural. Almost instead of trying to figure out what I'm meant to do, and instead of trying to focus on words, it led to us just being natural. She just gives a natural effect on you; she's such a fantastic actress, but she's able to give it across to other people as well."
The result is a trifecta of beautifully realistic but complicated performances in a visually stunning film. A Subotica Production, in association with Embankment, Joyride is presented by Magnolia Pictures, Ingenious, and Fís Éireann/Screen Ireland, and will be released December 23 in theaters and On Demand.