What if someone you loved became something else? From Blumhouse and visionary writer-director Leigh Whannell, the creators of the chilling modern monster tale The Invisible Man, comes a terrifying new lupine nightmare: Wolf Man.
Golden Globe nominee Christopher Abbott (Poor Things, It Comes at Night) stars as Blake, a San Francisco husband and father, who inherits his remote childhood home in rural Oregon after his own father vanishes and is presumed dead. With his marriage to his high-powered wife, Charlotte (Emmy winner Julia Garner; Ozark, Inventing Anna), fraying, Blake persuades Charlotte to take a break from the city and visit the property with
their young daughter, Ginger (Matila Firth ; Hullraisers, Coma).
But as the family approaches the farmhouse in the dead of night, they’re attacked by an unseen animal and, in a desperate escape, barricade themselves inside the home as the creature prowls the perimeter. As the night stretches on, however, Blake begins to behave strangely, transforming into something unrecognizable, and Charlotte will be forced to decide whether the terror within their house is more lethal than the danger without.
As Wolf Man releases in Australian cinemas on January 16, Nick L’Barrow spoke with the film’s stars, Christopher Abbott and Julia Garner, about the physicality of turning into the titular character, and how they found the humanity in their characters.
Nick: Christopher, was there an element of the physicality that you really needed to focus on during the transformation to still get that humanity and emotionality across once your character loses the ability to actually speak to his wife in the later stages of the story?
Christopher Abbott: I watched a lot of, like, animal videos. And not just wolf stuff, but whatever I could find. YouTube has a plethora of anything you want, right? So I would focus on the idea of how do animals communicate certain things, and then what the simplification of that comes across, mixed with a little human, you know?
I don’t remember the specific, but I do remember days where you play with a sound, and in your brain you’re like, ‘I want to say this line.’ And I want to say the line, but I can’t. So, how do I convey that? With your eyes, your mouth, your sounds, your body. Whatever just came to me. And that was a fun thing to play with.
What was that duality of finding the humanity and monstrosity of your performance like? Was there a challenge is keeping the humanity as you were transforming?
Christopher Abbott: Yeah, I mean there’s a challenge, but that was part of it for me. The transformation happens in stages, and it’s slow. So, while it’s challenging, it’s the fun part of this role. Especially when it was at that 50-50 stage of human and animal, just to play with the levels of that I thought was one of the more exciting things to do in this movie. I mean, how often do you get to do that?
Nick: Julia, some of the most heartbreaking moments of the film are watching Charlotte so desperately try and communicate with Blake when he can’t respond back in a human way. I’m curious to know what characteristics of either of your characters you were able to latch on to the most to find that feeling?
Julia Garner: I wanted to approach this like going through the seven stages of grief in one night. And one of them is desperation. Charlotte gets angry at one point. She’s hopeless, and then she’s depressed, and then she’s kind of desperate or delusional.
And I think desperate comes before acceptance, and that’s another stage of grief. She thinks that, somehow, he might hear her. She is desperate to be heard. For her husband to hear her. I think there’s something really devastating about that. It’s devastating knowing that the potential dream is dead. That just could make anyone upset.
Nick: A good bulk of the story takes place over one night. I’m curious to know how that effects your process when it comes to tapping into the larger emotional arc of Blake, compared to other movies that might do this story over a few days or weeks?
Christopher Abbott: Yeah, normally I feel like that would be challenging. But, the actual transformation, and how it takes place in the movie, I feel did a lot of that job for me. Everyone normally talks about how does the character change by the end of the movie. And this is the clearest possible way of doing that.
It all goes back to the physical stuff for me. To just keep track of the human, the animal, the relationship with the wife and the daughter. And then to really ratchet that up is fun to do.
Nick: How much does seeing Christopher in the prosthetics help your performance? It’s such a visceral thing to see on screen, so I can only imagine what it was like in real life.
Julia Garner: I mean, it makes it easier! It makes the performance better because it makes it more real. There’s nothing better than just the cameras capturing a real moment. You never want to, as an actor, to not have that. It’s like my worst nightmare!
Thank you to Christopher and Julia for their time, and to Universal Pictures for organising the interview! Wolf Man is in cinemas January 16.
