Olivia Colman became something of a boating expert and Peter Dinklage can now weave a mean basket — all thanks to Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer’s film Wicker, based on Ursula Wills’ short story.
Ahead of the film’s Sundance premiere, directors and cast sat down with Deadline at our Sundance Studio.
“The movie is about a fisherwoman in a small village,” Huston Fischer explained. “She stinks, she’s got a unibrow, everybody makes fun of her. One day she’s had enough, she goes to the local basket maker to commission a husband made out of wicker.”
“It’s intrinsically a very visual premise,” Wilson added. “And it just felt like it would be an amazing translation to screen. So that was a huge draw. And sort of the challenge of, ‘What would a wicker man look like?’ It was really exciting to us.”
Colman, who is also a producer, plays said fisherwoman. She said, “I don’t think she knew that she was creating anything other than wanting to retaliate against being ridiculed by the village, particularly the taylor’s wife.” Colman then pointed to Elizabeth Debicki on the panel, since Debicki plays that role. “They had known each other all their lives,” Colman went on. “And there was some last-straw moment where the Fisherwoman goes, ‘Please, can I have a husband?’ She just thought she wanted to shake things up and piss everyone off. And then accidentally, they fell in love, and then the village unravels, because we had a better relationship.”
Olivia Colman in ‘Wicker’ by Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer.
Sundance Institute/ Lol Crawley.
Asked why she felt drawn to the role, and what she had wanted to say about relationships and marriage, Colman joked, “I genuinely didn’t. I don’t think of anything very deeply. I didn’t think any of that.” She added, “I just really loved the script. I think it’s in my top three favorite scripts I’ve ever read, and I just wanted to play her, and that’s all there is to it. I thought this would be a beautiful film. I wanted to be in it, and that was it.”
Colman did have to attempt to paddle a boat — a “tippy” round craft called a coracle — for the role. “I loved it,” she said. “I remember [cinematographer] Lol [Crawley] giving me directions on how to do it, and he’d never sat in a coracle in a current, so that went down like a cup of cold sick.”
Meanwhile Dinklage, as the basket weaver, was demonstrating his craft. “I got really into weaving wicker. On set. We had a really great tutor. It was wonderful, and it’s part of being an actor is just going and doing strange things like that.”
His character, he added, is “lovely. He’s much like the fisherwoman. He’s just completely his own character. He doesn’t abide by the rules of the town folks. He’s an eccentric, flamboyant inventor.”
I was incredibly excited about playing this character, but he has a purity that scared me. I often gravitate towards conflicted characters, characters where there’s a darkness, or an internal struggle, or some kind of weird dichotomy of friction.
Alexander Skarsgård
Skarsgård said he initially found the role of the wicker husband a challenging concept.
“I was a little intimidated reading the script,” he said. “I knew I wanted to do it, and I was incredibly excited about playing this character, but he has a purity that scared me. I often gravitate towards conflicted characters, characters where there’s a darkness, or an internal struggle, or some kind of weird dichotomy of friction. And there’s a lot of friction in the movie, but none of it comes from the wicker husband. He is just pure — not naive — he’s just there. He loves his wife, and it’s just happy and sweet. So that scared me a bit.”
It felt like a departure from his previous roles, he said. “I didn’t really know how to approach it. I’m so used to — even if it’s a character who is ostensibly a protagonist — I often gravitate towards finding some darkness or friction or something that I lean into that because I feel like that’s very playable. I felt a bit unmoored by this, because then I was like, oh, not only is is the character void of that internal friction,
I also know that I have to kind of exaggerate everything, so I can’t be completely real and natural in the scenes, because, I was wearing a full mask every day, a full body suit actually glued to my face and body. And the way you move your face, you have to exaggerate it a bit. So that scared me also, playing these beautifully written scenes, intimate, quiet scenes with Olivia, where I can read every little detail on your face, or, then I have to go, like, [exaggerates expressions] ‘Ohhhh, realllllyy.’ And that made me little insecure, because I’m like, ‘Oh, I’m sh-t. This is terrible.’”
The Deadline Studio at Sundance is presented by Casamigos.
