[IMG:L]Elisha Cuthbert describes her new thriller Captivity, as “R at its finest” with imagery so graphic the film’s original billboards, advertising abduction, confinement, toruture and termination, were pulled at the request of the MPAA.
“I just saw the final cut of it yesterday, and it is so insane,” Cuthbert explains. “I can’t even tell you – like, I had no idea how, that is was going to turn out THAT crazy. Gory, psychological, everything, every second is like something. It’s unbelievable. It startled me, and I made the movie.”
Playing Jennifer, a kidnapped and tortured actress, put Cuthbert in a constant state of adrenaline on the set. No stranger to physically demanding roles like 24 and House of Wax, she met the challenge head on.
“I think once you’re up there, you stay up there,” she says. “And then I’d get home and I’d crash. I’d have just the best sleeps of my life whereas on other movies that are different than this sort of high octane energy, I find myself having really restless nights because of the pressure and the stress of filming. But when I’m doing something like this, it’s just a breeze really.”
To burn off some of that energy, Cuthbert engaged in a more intense work out regimen than usual. “I was working a 13 hour day and then going to the gym for an hour and then going to bed, but that was only because I was so amped up by the time I was done that I needed to just run it off.”
The part wasn’t just about getting physical. The 25-year-old, who admits to being sore for days and even losing her voice from all the required screaming, had to take her character on a journey from victim to fighter.
“There are mental aspects of trying to find where she breaks down, where she gives up, where she fights through, where she gets pissed off,” the starlet says. [I was] emotionally jumping from scene to scene and they’re all very different because I’m not going to play it all one way. Obviously there’s a progression so that is hard to kind of go, ‘Okay, where’s she at at this point?'”
While filming in Moscow, Russia for three months, Cuthbert had to take on extra duties to make sure director Roland Joffe’s orders weren’t lost in translation.
[IMG:R]”There were a lot of translators and God knows whether they were telling me the truth or not,” she says. “You never know with those translators. [joking]…We found ourselves constantly checking to see if everything was right. I realized I knew a lot about filmmaking because of that. On a standard film where everyone’s doing what they’ve got to do, you go in and you [are just] the actor. On this I found myself kind of checking sound, checking lighting, checking everything just to make sure everything was in check.”
With another movie in the can and two in the works, it seems like the rest of Cuthbert‘s year is planned out, leaving little chance for Kim Bauer’s return on 24, but the actress is always hopeful.
“We talk every year about it,” says the Alberta native. “There’s always an open dialogue. It’s just a matter of the timing of it and if it works for the script, and if I’m not off doing something else. This year we chatted quite a bit but it never ended up kind of working out, but I kind of wait by the phone and hope that they need me. I love going back. That’s like family to me. Starting off at 18 years old and it’s just a good group of people and such a great show to be on.”
As her career expands, Cuthbert has struggled to break free from traditional damsels in distress or sexpot roles. She’s even weighing the idea altering her looks in the same vein as Charlize Theron and Nicole Kidman.
“I think my whole thing is that I would really do anything to create a role,” Cuthbert explains. “I think shaving my head as a female would be probably the furthest thing I’d have to do physically to transform myself, aside from maybe gaining a lot of weight or losing a lot of weight. It appeals to me to want to go there. I think it’s so important to create a look and to create a character and to have people watch you and see the person you’re playing as opposed to the celebrity [you are].”
Captivity opens July 13.
