Yorgos Lanthimos on how to be an actor in his movies: ‘You might feel ridiculous’
In the new anthology film Kinds of Kindness, surrealist Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos tells three stories with the same group of actors — Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, and more. He recasts each of them in every segment: Plemons is a put-upon office worker, a paranoid cop, and a cultist investigator; Stone is a glamorous optometrist, a marine biologist who vanished, and a cultist having a crisis of faith (or some kind of crisis, anyway), and so on. Lanthimos moves these famous actors around roles that contrast with or complement each other, exploring different facets of their personalities.
It’s an extension of the way Lanthimos likes to work. Much of the cast, apart from Plemons, have been in his films before. It’s Stone’s third film in a row with him; the previous one, Poor Things, won her a Best Actress Oscar. And they’re about to make it four in a row. Lanthimos’ next film, Bugonia, set for release in 2025 and based on the Korean sci-fi comedy Save the Green Planet!, will star Stone again. Plemons is set to appear in that one, too.
Actors clearly like working for Lanthimos. So says English actor Joe Alwyn (Conversations with Friends), who appeared with Stone in Lanthimos’ The Favourite and has funny bit parts in the first two Kinds of Kindness stories before taking a larger role in the third as the estranged husband of Stone’s character.
“It’s like a theater troupe, and it felt very playful,” Alwyn told Polygon in an interview alongside Lanthimos. “Being on the set for The Favourite and Kinds of Kindness didn’t feel like going to work in the way that it sometimes does, or can sometimes slip into. It felt like you were gonna go and play. And that’s such a nice feeling, as an actor, to hold on to as much as you can. That comes from the material, of course, and also the way that Yorgos is on set, and his rehearsal, and every component, and every department. It’s rare to feel that as much as I have with those two films. It’s really just
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