Emma Myles – Child of Grace

By starrymag | September 27, 2015

By: Lisa Steinberg

 

 

Q) What are the recent projects that you are working on?

A) I’m auditioning a lot. I just did a workshop of a play with one of my favorite playwrights in Nantucket. Hopefully, something will happen with it in the future. We’re shooting “Orange Is The New Black” and it is kind of hard to do anything else.

Q) When were you able to film your movie Child of Grace?

A) I shot it during season two of “Orange Is The New Black.” So, it was quite a while ago. Even that was a difficult situation because they had to write me out of the episode due to a scheduling conflict. I shot it over a ten day period.

Q) What drew you to the project?

A) It was the script. I read it and I was so emotional after reading it. If something hits me then I know it is something that I want the opportunity to do. There were so many layers to this character and I thought, “What an incredible challenge it would be to walk in her shoes.” It ended up being one of the hardest jobs I’ve even had, in terms of being emotionally taxing. It was really, really worth it and I’m really happy with the work and movie.

Q) Please tell us the premise for the film and about your character.

A) The movie is about a little girl (Maggie Elizabeth Jones) who travels around America in an RV with her dad. They are always on the go, but not on the run. When you are a kid, you accept the reality of what you are living in. She is not really questioning it. She is home schooled and they have adventures together. One day, the RV breaks down and it will take a couple of days to get the part they need, which upsets her father. She walks around a grocery store and finds a wall with missing children’s photos on it. She sees one of the posters with a photo that resembles her and she realizes that the man she has been traveling with is not actually her father and could quite possibly be her kidnapper. I play her biological mother who had her at seventeen years old and was a drug addict, not a fit mother at all. I get carjacked and she is in the car. I never see her again after that. At the beginning of the movie they find my car in a lake and she isn’t inside. It’s a rollercoaster of finding out that my child could be alive and I’ve been berating myself with guilt for the last eight years where I have turned my life around and found God. I’m in a better place, but it brings up memories of everything I had gone through. It’s really great and Ted Levine from Silence of the Lambs plays my father who is the sheriff. So, he’s been actively looking this whole time for this little girl where you can tell I’m a little bit more tentative because it makes me so upset.

Q) How did you get in the mindset for the character?

A) I did a lot of research and once you watch it you will see what I was actually researching. I don’t want to say too much because it would give away a plot point. I have my own kind of loss in my life and when I know I’m going to be working on something that is emotionally difficult I get into my zone and really try to feel what the character could be feeling. What was interesting about this character was that there were so many different layers to her. There were so many different facets. You want to be true to the text, but you also want to be true to the character. And you also want to be sure the audience only knows what they are supposed to know, as opposed to giving things away based off of your performance. So, it was very technically hard. I think it worked out!

Q) What was the most compelling aspect of the role?

A) I think the fact she had been a junkie and completely turned her life around. I’ve never had to do something like that. I’ve never gone from one extreme to another, but it was really interesting to play that. I’m not a religious person, by any means, but there are certain elements to this that are very faith based that I know that it will resonate with people. She was just a really interesting character and by the end of my story – for me – by the time it in the script where I had learned some things I was like, “I have to play her!”

Q) What was it like working with director Ian McCrudden?

A) He’s really great! He’s a dad so he’s very nurturing, but he also had a lot of energy! He can be really speedy with things. Not rushing the work, but immediately after the take you go into it again. So, you want to make sure you have all of your work done beforehand so you can actually abide by his guidelines. He trusted me a lot and knew how much work that I had put into it. I think that is a really important relationship for the director to have with the actor and for the actor to have with the director. I trusted him just as much as he trusted me and you have to have that dynamic in order for things to work out.

Q) Being a part of social media, are you excited to receive instant fan feedback when the film premieres?

A) I thought it was really good and I’m excited for people to see me do something different than Leanne in “Orange.” “Orange” is my most notable situation and what people kind of know me from. The fact that I’m not going to have brown teeth will shock people. I have clean hair – what happened?! I am excited for people to see it.

Q) You are a fan favorite on “Orange Is The New Black.” What is your aspect to Leanne and Angie’s relationship?

A) Julie [lake] and I talk about this all the time! Angie is the only person that I actually like. Angie is the only person Leanne is actually nice to and everyone else I’m really dismissive of or actively mean. Julie and I were trying to figure this out. She was like, “What do you think it is about Angie that Leanne’s trusts her, will spend time with her and won’t be mean. Everyone else you like to stomp on.” I think that Leanne thinks she is really funny and from all of the things I’ve been through Angie is like her saving grace in the prison system. I’m sure she probably reminds me of some of my family members and it is nice to have that comradery, even when we’re being assholes.

Q) Talk about filming the “Edward Pizza Hands” scene from Season 2.

A) That was totally Julie! She totally improvised that. We were dying! I think she did it on the second take and I almost spit the teeth out of my mouth! They yelled, “Cut,” and then the writer on that episode (who is also one of our producers) said, “Yes! Do that again!” It made it onto the show and we were so excited. They were lovely enough to let Julie take the credit for that because it was such a genius improv. She is just so insanely funny that it is not shocking that she comes up with this stuff on the fly.

Q) What has been your favorite improvised moment from filming “Orange?”

A) One was when we were worshipping the Norma toast. We have the shrine and then Poussey comes in, throws it on the ground and then Weeping Woman starts blubbering in my ear. I turn around and say, “Would you stop it?! It’s fine!” I loved that and then in Season 3 when we were doing our sun salute and Caputo tells us to break it up. Julie gave the right answer and he was like, “Yes. You get a gold star.” As we were walking away, we had this long improvised situation where she was saying, “I’m so excited to get answers right! I never get answers right.” I said, “Yes! I need you on my side! We need to be together.” We had this really true Leanne/Angie improvised moment. It depends on what they keep, but we improvise all the time. Most of the stuff that actually gets kept is the scripted stuff.

Q) In Season 3 we find out about Angie’s backstory. What shocked you or surprised you about her background?

A) What didn’t surprise me! The bonnet was fun. Everything was really shocking to me. It kind of had been hinted to me around episode five, but I didn’t know if it was actually happening or what they would dive into. I thought it was just a really interesting turn for her because you don’t expect that. You expect her to be white trash and living on the streets. The fact that she comes from this sweet Amish background from afar with sweet, loving parents. Also, what she was doing was so noble. By leaving she was trying to help her parents and I think what the most emotional part of it was that we all felt that way. We have all felt like, “It would be better if I wasn’t here.” If you haven’t felt like that, it is a horrible thing to feel. To bring that into perspective was the saddest thing that I’ve ever read. It was just better that she wasn’t there and that was the only way she could help her family. The saddest thing still is that even though she wanted to go back to her family…She wanted to go back to her community, but she chose to protect her parents and still ended up in this drugged out situation. It’s like, “No wonder she is so mean.”

Q) She did have a side “friendship” with Pensatucky for a bit.

A) Taryn [Manning] and I are always really bummed that they ripped us apart. Kimiko [Glenn] and I were also really bummed that they ripped us apart. I’m actually really surprised they haven’t ripped Julie and I apart yet because we are so close. Taryn and I are really, really close. She is like one of my best friends and Kimiko and I are really close. It’s like, “Here are all these people you are really close to, but guys are going to have to pretend to hate each other and you’ll never have scenes together ever again.”

Q) What was it like then for you to have to film the scene where you cut off Soso’s hair?

A) I found out about it like a week before shooting because they needed to do a haircut on Kimiko to give her a wig. She said, “They are going to give me a wig.” I said, “What?!” She said, “Yeah, my hair is going to get cut off.” I said, “I wonder why. That’s weird.” She said, “Yeah, you cut it off.” I was like, “What?! Are you kidding me?!” When I got the script, I thought it was a so over the top, Mean Girls, situation. But we had a blast filming it and it was funny, too. We shot it and because we were so far away we were able to shoot both of us at the same time without other cameras getting in the way. Kimiko was yelling at me afterwards because she was barely able to keep it together when I was doing my Pocahontas dance. That actually went on for a lot longer because there was a take where I take the blanket off the bed, wrap it around myself and start dancing.

Q) Is there anything else want to share with fans about your movie Child of Grace?

A) I got to work with O-Lan Jones. A lot of people will know her from Tim Burton films. She is an epic human being.