Rachael Carpani – If There Be Thorns

By: Jamie Steinberg

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

A) There is nothing I can talk about just yet!

Q) What made you want to be a part of the films If There Be Thorns and Seeds of Yesterday?

A) The opportunity arose to play Cathy in If There Be Thorns and then age her up and play her in her 50’s in Seeds of Yesterday. So, I was excited to play her and do the age progression for both films. Also, I have been a fan of the books for years. I do remember sneaking the original of Flowers In The Attic off my mom’s bookshelf in the 80’s. I was reading it when I was probably far too young to read it. Then, I read the other three books when I was a teenager. I was on set a lot as a teenager in Australia and there was no Facebook or anything to play around with on your phone. So we found a way to stay busy. I think there was a knitting craze that went through some actors at some point, but I would just bring piles of books to the set. I think that’s where I read the other three books so I was really, really familiar with them. As soon as I learned I would be playing Cathy I reread all four books again, especially the two I was going to be in.

Q) Was there anything you added to your role that wasn’t originally scripted for you?

A) I’m not sure. It was pretty much there. It was pretty much laid out for us in the writing and last time had already set up the stylized version of how they were going to shoot. With the character of Cathy, I concentrated less on imitating or trying to emulate what any of the two previous wonderful actresses (Kiernan [Shipka] and Rose [McIver]) had done. There is no point in trying to do that because we are three different people and we would be portraying Cathy at three (or four if you count the prosthetic wrinkles for the movie) different stages of her life. It was written quite beautifully and I just concentrated more on what Kiernan and Rose did and how they represented Cathy at the different stages of her life. Kiernan really grounded in the first film and then I saw what was happening through the audiences’ eyes. Rose played her during her formative years where she is quite vulnerable and her and Chris are trying to live in the big bad world. In If There Be Thorns, Cathy and Chris are trying to pretend the past never happened and set up this dream-like very fragile world. They are playing house is how we saw them. They are dressed as husband and wife as though it were perfectly normal. I looked back at Heather in Flowers In The Attic and that same way that she had created this perfect little family before she loses her husband. My plan was to watch Cathy do a full circle and see traits of Corrine in Cathy as she got older and progressed. I concentrated more on that than trying to emulate what other actresses had done before me. It was more important the audience see Cathy’s journey as opposed to one person playing her. It was really fun playing Cathy in Seeds of Yesterday because I really got to change up my physicality and age her in other ways than just the prosthetics and mask of silicone they’d paint on my face every day.

Q) What kind of physical transformation did you need to do for the films?

A) It wasn’t comfortable. The makeup team was wonderful, but they would paint silicone on my face and blast it with a hairdryer to wrinkle up and scratch up my face. Heather Graham had to have that done and more so in If here Be Thorns and her process was a lot longer because they had to make her look a lot older. That was fun just to have the costumes on and they aged up my face. It was fun changing up my physicality. It was my first time playing that much older.

Q) Was there instant chemistry when the cast began working together or did it take some time to bond?

A) Absolutely! We shot in Vancouver and most of the group was from out of town. You naturally bond and everyone got on really, really well. With If There Be Thorns it was really Heather, Jason [Lewis] and I that were the only adults in the cast. We had wonderful and very talented Mason Cook who plays Bart. He was so creepy in that film and Jedidiah Goodacre who played Jory. Then, we had little Bailey [Skodje] who played Cindy. Heather was just so lovely and she is an avid reader. She had done so much research with the books. She always had them on hand and I’d re-bought them, but it was so great to see someone else had delved so deeply into it. I’m sure she had been doing that since Flowers In The Attic. It was great that there was someone else so deeply engrossed in the books and the scripts. We all got on really, really well. We were all mates up there! With Seeds of Yesterday, it was a different dynamic because it was really that we were all much closer in age. It was quite funny because one of the actors who played my son met me when I had my Cathy wrinkles on. He introduced himself during the makeup tests before we started shooting. He thought I looked like that. He thought that was my age. Then, a big group of us went out to dinner and had some drinks. The actor who played my son hadn’t seen me without my wrinkles on so when we all went out to dinner, George looked at me and went, “What happened to your face?! I thought you were in your late 40’s or 50’s! What did you do to your face?” I said, “I thought you realized I was in makeup.” He said, “No. I thought you really looked like that!” So, he got a bit of a shock. For a couple of days he had thought that was my true age and I caught him with his mouth on the floor saying, “It’s still freaking me out, Rachael. It’s like you dropped twenty-five years in twenty-four hours. It’s very, very strange.”

Q) Was that your most memorable moment from filming?

A) That was offset as my most memorable moment. I have to say though, the scene with Mason (who is just incredible in If There Be Thorns) when he tries to drown Cindy. That was a really disturbing scene to shoot. We didn’t realize how disturbing it would be until we were actually there shooting it. From watching from the monitors inside…You only see a few seconds of it on screen, but we shot so much raw footage. It was really, really disturbing to watch. I think Mason did a wonderful job, but we didn’t realize how hard it would be to watch something like that happened. Everyone was safe and there were mechanics and robots involved so the little actress playing Cindy didn’t have to understand how dark that moment really was. She was kept safe and happy. We used some robotics to simulate the drowning part, but Mason had to be the one to hold her under. He was fantastic. He did that so well, but watching it with the crew one of them said, “I can’t watch this anymore. I can’t watch a kid trying to drown another kid, even if it is a mechanical robot.” They shot it and cut it together really well so it is quite creepy. In Seeds of Yesterday, I think the final confrontation between Cathy and Bart where she makes the final decision to leave him because she has pretty much been the only one who keeps defending him. By the end, she knows all the secrets and knew he was sleeping with Melodie (Jory’s wife) before anybody and she kept that secret. She carried on and she is the one who doesn’t want to abandon him. She doesn’t want to do what was done to her. She doesn’t want to leave her child. That final scene in the chapel, even though he is threatening her and really losing it at that point while believing that he is sort of Malcolm (if you will) – or parts of him are Malcolm. And he is reciting from Malcolm’s journal and he is technically threatening her life, she is still clinging to that vain hope that she can help him and she is trying to talk him through it and explain it to him even with a knife to her throat. I think that says a lot about Cathy and the lengths she will go to for her children and also to prove “I’m not like my mother.” That moment where she decides to leave him and gets up and walks away is sort of the turning point for her that she has no choice, but does have to leave. There is part of her mother running through her that she can almost relate to and it comes full circle. Then, when she lays flowers at Corrine’s grave there is an understanding. As my mother used to say to me, “Just you wait until you are a mother and then you’ll understand.” I remember shooting that scene and it was quite intense. James Maslow did a wonderful job of shooting that. He did a fantastic job.

Q) You are a part of social media. Are you looking forward to the instant fan feedback you will receive?

A) Yes! Hopefully, people will be nice. Hopefully, people will enjoy them and like where they go and enjoy the ride. I was relatively new to social media. Only a year ago did I really get into. So, I’m still learning, but it is a nice way to communicate with people. I’m really still learning. I had to get my cousin how to use Twitter when I joined. I am looking forward that people can instantly share what they are thinking when they are watching the film.

Q) What would you like to say to everyone who is a fan and supporter of you and your work?

A) I would like to say thank you! Really thank you! With social media these days, it’s so nice when people take the time to post comments about your work and things you have done, especially as soon as it airs or they have seen it. I’d like to say thank you to people who have actually been following my work and actually found me on Twitter, have sought me out and written lovely things and expressed how excited they are for the two sequels to come out. I hope they enjoy them and I look forward to hearing what they think