![]() I also have a lot of fight, and my dad used to say when I was a kid that I was born on planet Zod. Even when I’ve auditioned for big studio comic films, I’ve always been asked to test for the villain, and I love that because I love tapping into that space. I still am sometimes quite surprised to discover that most of the interest in me is for these women with balls, you know. ![]() I was 25, and I didn’t know where I’d be placed, how I would translate. When I entered this industry, I was older. To be honest, it’s not so much what I’m going for it’s what people see in me. I’ve noticed that in a handful of films - Fury Road, Neon Demon, Elizabeth Harvest - you’ve played these very stylized women who are avatars of male desire, and who end up violently rebelling against them. There are really deep reasons that I chose to do this film, like Elizabeth’s constant rebirth and the fairy-tale aspect of it, and then there’s reasons where I’m like, “That would be fucking fun.” Like, I got to hold a gun and bleed from the mouth and crawl out of a tank covered in ooze. It’s so rare for a woman to be handed a script that has this much gusto, where the female character is driving the film in a really sort of violent way. I’ve had some pretty heavy heartaches the past couple of years, and I’ve really tried and gone gung ho, but there has to be something that’s really exciting to me. I’m not saying I get handed everything that’s out there. I can really sort of craft my way a little bit. I’m financially stable, because I modeled for half of my life, so I don’t have to make decisions based on money. I was kind of keeping tabs on each girl so I could step in and out.ĭo you feel like you can be selective with the projects you take, or do you feel a pressure to commit to things because you’re newer to the film industry? I’d find a picture of a woman who reminds me of the essence of that Elizabeth, and I printed out cards and on the back I had a song for her, a nickname for her, her favorite food, her favorite color. There were some days where I had to play four Elizabeths in one day, so I gave them all a specific name. She’s also British and I made the decision that she was well-educated, which means she had a different set of manners to her, a different way of holding her neck up and stuff like that. I decided that she took ballet, which I’ve never done in my life, so I took ballet classes and that changed the way that I moved. I really went into detail about her past, which informed the physicality that I chose, which is very different from my own. It’s not the sort of film where you can just fucking wing that shit. I couldn’t build backstories for all of the Elizabeths separately, but I spent a lot of time writing a backstory about the original Elizabeth. Before Elizabeth Harvest debuts in theaters this weekend, Vulture got on the phone with Lee to talk about how she prepared for her most ambitious role yet, the tolerance for bullshit she developed while working in fashion, and what question she never, ever wants to answer again.ĭid each of your Elizabeths have a backstory, or was each one just a blank slate because she was reacting to the world anew? While her characters may conjure fantasy, they’re also adept at exploiting desire for its weakness and punishing those who would keep them prisoner. And now she’s starring in Elizabeth Harvest from Sebastian Gutierrez, a techno-modern telling of the story of Bluebeard, in which Lee plays multiple versions of the titular character - a woman who’s being fabricated in a lab and repeatedly murdered by her mad scientist husband (Ciarán Hinds).īut don’t make the mistake of counting her as just a pretty face. Nicolas Winding Refn cast her as his most vicious climber in The Neon Demon, a meditation on how we commoditize and worship beauty. George Miller gave Lee her screen debut with Mad Max: Fury Road, in which she played the Dag, the most eccentric member of the Many Wives collective. Her almost-supernatural beauty means filmmakers have sought her out for years to play otherworldly and alluring characters. Watching Australian actress Abbey Lee makes you wonder if the Men in Black isn’t a real agency welcoming visitors from other worlds to work and live on Earth.
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