Rachael Huntley – Happy Homemaker

Q.  Are there any current projects that you are working on?

A.  Right now I’ve just been kind of auditioning a lot and I am in talks with a couple producers about a couple projects, but nothing since that and I kind of just wanted to have a little down time beforeMr. and Mrs. Smith opens to kind of really get ready for that. 

Q.  Recently you starred in the movie Mr. and Mrs. Smith; can you tell us a bit about the movie and your role?

A.  In the movie Brad and Angelina are married to each other and they are each assassins for a different company but they don’t know that the other one is an assassins.  Eventually, they get hired to kill each other without knowing that she is assigned to basically kill this guy, she doesn’t realize until later that it’s low and behold her husband.  So, eventually they realize that they are supposed to be killing each other and they’re living undercover in suburban New York and I am their neighbor.  I am pretty much the perfect suburban housewife, I always am the type to that has the muffins ready in the oven and my house is immaculate and I wear lots of pink.  You know just hair is always done, even in the middle of the night, that sort of thing, I of course have no idea that they are undercover assassins.  They kind of use me as part of their cover so to speak.

Q.  How did it feel having Angelina Jolie select you to play her best friend?

A.  Yeah that was insane, the casting director happened to mention to me that Angelina had cast me and I didn’t really know anything more than that. So, when I met her I just said, first of all she was so sweet!  I said “Hi, I’m Rachael Huntley,” and she said “Oh hi, I’m Angie!”  And, I said “Okay, Ms. Jolie,” and she was like “No, please call me Angie, don’t call me Angelina or anything like that.”  She was very sweet and I said, “I understand that you had a hand in casting me, I just want to say thank you.”  She was like “No, I just happened to be there when the director was looking at the audition tapes, please don’t think I was being a Diva and that I had to cast everything.  The guy happened to be watching them and I said hey can I help cast this because this is supposed to be my friend and you seemed like someone I could be friends with so I cast you.”  I mean I was flabbergasted obviously, she was just very sweet and gracious and I was kind of shocked by all of it. 

Q.  What was it like working with Angelina Jolie and being her best friend in the movie?

A.  You’ll probably hear me use this word a lot, very surreal, but she was so, I just couldn’t believe how friendly she was.  She was very gracious and at one point, she and the director and the writer were rewriting a scene that I was in with her and I happened to be kind of standing near them.  She turned to me and said “Does that work for you, how does that sound, what do you think?”  I was sitting there like, “I’ll do whatever ya’ll tell me to do!”  But she was very gracious and easy going and just in between takes we would chat a little bit, she wasn’t stuck up or anything like that.  She was just doing her job and that’s how it seemed.

Q.  Do you have a most memorable moment from working on the film?

A.  Well, I guess one of the most memorable things was when, the writer was on the set the whole time, his name is Simon and he came up to me and it was one of the first days of shooting.  He was kind of making small talk and asking me how many movies I had been in, what else had I done, I had to be honest and I was like, “this is my first project.”  He was just very gracious about that and he basically said, I can’t believe that, you’re so professional, you’re doing great and he went on.  It was just so incredible to hear, he said to be honest your role I was the most worried about coming off correctly and he said I just want you to know you’re doing it even better than I had envisioned it.  I just was you know, blown away by that, that he would come up to me and tell me that was really nice, it was incredible actually.

Q.  The audition for Mr. and Mrs. Smith was only your second professional audition, were you nervous during the audition process at all?

A.  You know what’s funny, I was nervous when I got the call that I had the audition.  But, by the time I got to the audition I think, I don’t know if this sounds bad or not, but I think I just felt like it was so far out of my league at that time that I wasn’t really nervous.  Because I just didn’t think that I had a chance in the world of getting it.  I think I just thought that this doesn’t happen on your second audition, you don’t get a part like this.  So, I just kind of went in and not expecting much, so I was kind of treating it like this will be a fun experience, I’ll meet a casting director, and I’ll get to tell everybody that I got to audition for a Brad Pitt film.  So, I would probably be more nervous now, but at the time I think it just seemed so out of my league that I didn’t really give myself a chance to be nervous.  Not to mention the fact that pretty much anything that could go wrong did go wrong, I went to FOX studios and I tried to go into the wrong gate.  So, I had to go to a different gate and then I parked in the wrong spot and I went to the wrong building and as I was walking to the right building the heel on my shoe broke.  It was just one of those things, I think by the time I got to the audition I was just kind of like screw it, just go in and have fun.

Q.  How was it working with director Doug Liman on the film?

A.  It was, I honestly don’t have too terribly much to compare it to since I am new to all of this.  He was very easy to work with and he was really clear when he wanted something done a certain way, he’d let you know.  He was kind of quiet actually, he didn’t really talk unless something needed to be said, you know something needed to be fixed or if something was going extremely well he’d mention it.  But, it was pretty easy, it was a really easy set to be on, it didn’t seem to be too much tension or stress, at least not on the days that I was there.  I am sure when they were doing stunt work those days were tense, but I wasn’t there on any of those.  So, the days that I were there it was just a very nice, congenial atmosphere. 

Q.  The role was originally written as a cameo, how did it get expanded?

A.  I don’t completely know, when I went in on my first day of shooting and I got that copy of the script I was only in one scene.  At the end of shooting that scene, I went up to Brad and Doug Liman just to say thanks, it was a great experience, good luck with the rest of your shoot, blah blah blah.  Brad looked at Doug and looked at me and was like, “Wait, she’s coming back right?”  Doug was like “Oh yeah, we were talking with Simon the writer and we think we’re going to write you in to a little more, you’ve just been great and we have some ideas.”   don’t think they wrote the scene to bring me more into the movie, in fact I’m sure they didn’t, I think it was just that they had some thoughts about some more scenes I would be useful in and then maybe after seeing me work they thought it might actually be a good idea.  So, they wrote me in a little bit more and I have of course no idea how it has been edited, so I might be back to being a cameo!  Yeah, I did get to go and film a bit more which was great.

Q.  Your role was written as the “June Clever of 2005,” how did you get in character for that?

A.  I grew up in suburban Houston and pretty much all of my friend’s moms were that way, so I really just kind of took myself back to junior high and high school.  In particular, I had one friend’s mom who was so perfect, that you could wake up in the middle of the night and go downstairs to the kitchen.  If she heard you had woken up, she’d come check and make sure you were okay and she had on full makeup.  I’m not kidding!  I don’t know how she did it, I guess maybe she just slept in it but washed it off and just redid it, I don’t know.  Just fresh cookies all the time, bread was homemade and you know, the house was immaculate and everything was the latest design.  Very nice, just unbelievable, just one of those houses you love to go over to because you know everything will be nice and neat and there will be plenty to eat, all that sort of stuff. She was kind of the one I drew on the most, but really most of my friend’s moms were kind of that way, very involved in the PTA and the Junior League and all that sort of stuff. So, it was really easy to draw from that.

Q.  You’ve recently just worked with two of the biggest names in the acting business, who would you love to work with in the future?

A.  As far as men go, I would actually really love to work with Matt Damon, I think he’s very similar to Brad Pitt in the sense that they are both very good looking, and that’s normally what they get noticed for.  They happen to be incredible actors as well, similar with Jude Law, I think that’s kind of why he took some of the roles he took where he’s not the pretty guy, just to kind of break out of that. 

Q.  Why should moviegoers flock to see Mr. and Mrs. Smith when it comes out in theaters?

A.  Because the script is just incredible, you know it’s definitely an action flick and kind of sort of a loosely romantic/comedy action, in the vain of true life type of thing.  It’s so easy for those types of movies to have horrible scripts and to rely on the stunts and to rely on the star name of Brad and Angelina.  So, I think that they will be so pleasantly surprised by the fact that the script is well written, it’s really funny, it’s action-packed, it’s a really exciting movie experience.