(Cover) - EN Movies - Kelly Reilly has joked she thought she’d been “cut out of the movie” when she saw the trailer for Flight.
The British actress plays drug addict Nicole in the drama about an alcoholic airplane pilot.
Denzel Washington plays the lead role, Captain Whip Whitaker, and the red-headed actress quipped she barely features in the movie’s preview.
The 35-year-old believes it is part of an actor’s job to put the scene selection into the hands of the director.
“I saw the trailer; I thought I’d been cut out of the movie entirely!” she laughed to Cover Media. “As an actor, you don’t have any control over that. It’s an exercise of trust and surrender and that’s why you want to work with good directors, who are committed to the work you’re doing and respond to it.”
Whereas Kelly and Denzel’s characters push moral boundaries, the actress trusted director Robert Zemeckis to make them believable people that the audience could empathise with.
Whereas it might be tempting to play up to expectations, Kelly is reluctant to act in a certain way just to please people.
“You just play the character as truthfully as you can; light and dark, bad and good and all those things that we all are. There’s no point in playing a saintly character to try to be loved,” she explained.
“I don’t like seeing that in movies, when actors do that. I’d much rather see somebody a bit more complicated.”
One particularly harrowing scene shows Kelly’s character injecting herself with a strong dose of heroine.
Robert found the moment particularly difficult to watch, but Kelly enjoyed exploring the world of addiction.
“It’s weird ‘cause I actually enjoyed doing those scenes! I actually had to learn to shoot up. It’s like some actors have to learn to play the guitar for a part and I had to learn how to do that,” she recalled.
“I wanted it to look like she’s making coffee; like this is shorthand...I enjoyed going into that world, it might sound dark but it was something I had never done before and the way Robert was shooting was very sensitive. It was a small part for me, the heroin part.”
