Ciao Abbey, thanks for talking with me. Where are you now? How are you spending your summer?
AL I’m currently in New York finishing up shooting a TV show called Black Rabbit. Once I’m done I’m heading to Ibiza for 5 days for my best friend 40th birthday.
How do you prepare for a role? I know there are different methods of preparation.
AL It entirely depends on the role but I will say one thing that doesn’t change is the script work. It’s important for me to get deeply involved with the text and that means spending a good amount of time reading it multiple times and finding the space alone to really mull over it and notice how it makes me feel as I read it and what comes up in my own life as I’m reading it. There’s also generally dialect work I need to get on top of as I’m Australian and work mostly in America so that’s a technical aspect of prep I put good time into. My acting coach Meghan McGarry is always involved early on in my prep. She’s a method trained teacher, so I’ve studied method for some time and work from that space mostly. But there is always variable and each role and job requires a different amount of energy and different tools.
I still remember very clearly the first time I saw The Neon Demon, in 2016. By the end of the film, I felt like someone had sucked all my vitality down to the bone – I only felt the same way with Requiem for a Dream, yet they are very different. Did it give you the same feeling too? What was it like to be a part of it? Also, there are many silences in Refn’s films, like in Drive.
AL Shooting The Neon Demon certainly required a specific energy and focus from me. Nicolas felt strongly that my character should be as still and contained as possible regardless of her somewhat violent nature. So this created an intense frustration. He would hold the camera on me for long lengths of time whilst he directed me to not move a muscle, to barely blink or breathe let alone move. And this made me want to scream or run or thrash about. Which was a brilliant move by him because I think you feel that in the character when you watch it. Also playing a character which I regarded as more a symbol than a person was confronting… She was the creepy sadistic side of the fashion industry. All the ugly desperate feelings that can come up as a model.
Moving from neon-noir to other genres, you’ve been part of some visually striking films. You recently had a role in Horizon by Kevin Costner, set in pre and post-Civil War America, detailing the exploration of the American West. Do you find yourself drawn to projects with a strong visual component?
AL I think it’s a symbiotic attraction. I think potentially because of my nature and my physical appearance, strong visual films and me mix well. For example it’s been very hard for me to book roles that are somewhat based in the everyday lives of humans in a home environment because I look like an alien and I’m almost 6 feet tall.
Horizon surely takes you on a journey. Costner described it as a love letter to the land of the free, to the landscapes in this country that brought us both heaven and hell. Many of us grew up with the myth of the American dream, and I’m curious to know what your perception was as an Australian-born.
AL I think just landing in New York at 19 to start a whole new journey was a massive culture shock. I come from a country that relative to a lot of places I’ve now lived in and spent time in, it is quite narrow minded. I love Australia for a lot of beautiful things but there is a sense of being sheltered from the rest of the world there, as though you can get by in life in this cosy bubble. I don’t mean to say that life is easy there because like any country or anyone’s upbringing there is pain and hardship. But there is definitely a feeling of keeping yourself small and inside the boundaries of white Australian culture. Coming to New York and being amongst thousands of people who seemed so brave in their self-expression and mostly left alone to be anyone they wanted to be was incredible. I felt like I could safely explore who I wanted to be in the world and how I wanted to express that. I was also in love with the melting pot aspect of New York. We are not as culturally diverse in Australia so to be thrown in the mix with people from all corners of the world was a huge and incredibly exciting eye opener.
I have the feeling that the characters you portray are very different from each other but, above all, capable of representing multiple facets of femininity. I’m thinking about The Dag in Mad Max and Christina Braithwaite from Lovecraft Country, adapted from Matt Ruff’s novel. It’s as if the characters you play change and develop as you change and evolve. Is that so?
AL I think as long as you are constantly growing in your craft and expanding your life experience then of course what you attract in your work will be a reflection of your own life. Actors have a multitude of reasons for being an actor and for me it’s very much about getting to the truth of the human experience and exploring that, so yes — I think my roles change as I change.
I’d like to know the name of an actress you would like to work with and why. Do you have a muse of sorts?
AL Gena Rowlands, Jessica Lange and Viola Davis would be my three dream co-stars and women I look up to very much. For me the most interesting trait of an actress is one who seems to be like a mustang, unhinged but fiercely strong whilst they remain vulnerable to the world and willing to show that vulnerability on the screen. These women take big risks to expose aspects of themselves that maybe society doesn’t necessarily want to see from women on the street let alone on the screen.
Read the full interview on Muse September Issue 64.
Text by Francesca Fontanesi
