ART & CULTURE

PHOTOGRAPHY
KEVIN SINCLAIR 

"Every mask has a function. This mask is about preservation."

South African award-winning actress and producer Alice Krige has enjoyed over forty years in the entertainment industry. She has costarred in the Academy Award winning film Chariots of Fire and Ghost Story and has appeared in three versions of Star Trek: the movie First Contact, the video game Armada 2, and the Voyager TV series End Game. Alice is also a brilliant stage actress who has played with the Royal Shakespeare Company and is an accomplished television actress with roles in the BBC series The Syndicate and Partners in Crime and guest appearances in Six Feet Under and Law & Order Criminal Intent.

Alice is currently starring in a recently released psychological horror film She Will, alongside Kota Eberhardt and Malcolm McDowell and directed by Charlotte Colbert. In this film, Alice's character, Veronica Ghent, is a former childhood actress who, now aged, escapes to a retreat to recover after surgery but ends up confronting her past in the most mysterious ways. 

CA __ To me, what is ironic is how you started studying psychology and then pivoted to acting. I have studied theater and drama since I was a child. Then I went to college for psychology. So my degrees are in psychology.

AK __ It's interesting because it is the same material.

CA __ With your mother being a psychology professor, growing up under her, I'm sure you learned a lot about people in general. How has that understanding of human behavior shaped or prepared you for your various roles in television, theater, and movies?

AK __ My mum went back to uni when I was thirteen. And that was very powerful because she broke the mold of a housewife in South Africa, which was two decades behind the rest of the world. There was no other mother that I knew that had gone back to uni. She was obviously very good at what she did. And they asked her to teach, and she became a professor. I was shaped by her demonstrating that you could go out there and follow your dreams. She used to say that you approach a car, a patient, or a client with unconditional positive regard. So all these weird characters that I wound up playing, I never judged them. I accept that they are who they are, unconditional positive regard for even someone like Christabella, who totally messed me up in Silent Hill. That was like a journey into the heart of darkness, but I couldn't judge her. I had to see the world through her eyes. I think that was, in a way, what my mother's practice as a psychologist taught me- that she did not judge anyone who came to her. She tried to understand how they were experiencing the world from their point of view so that she could help them in a therapeutic setting. But to begin, she had to be on their side. And another thing that I learned. Although my mum never told me the names of clients, she would come home, and at our dinner table, we either talked about medicine or psychology. We would talk about family dynamics. We never knew who they were, but you started understanding how families could operate as a unit, functionally or dysfunctionally. It was kind of intellectual, but ultimately it's become a sort of intuitive feel for everything, not only what's being said on the surface, but what's happening unspoken underneath. And that goes on with all of us all the time. We have these streams of external and internal dialogues with ourselves. I guess one hopes to tap into internal dialogue, the script you've been given, and the character's inner world. I'm sure that everything I imbibed from my mother without even thinking about it informed how I work.   

CA __ You have been blessed to have talent around you all your life, from your parents to your husband, with whom you've been married for over 20 years. How is it being married to such another brilliantly creative person?

AK __ Well, it's a wonderful thing, but it's also a challenging thing. We are very unlike each other; we are diametrically opposite from an astrological point of view. But I think the truly remarkable thing about a marriage that has lasted this long is that you finally learn to make space for what the other person needs. And to let go when necessary because it's a give and take. It's not only me doing this, but him as well. I think we've gotten better and better at it as we've grown older. Apart from just the wonderful thing of a relationship that has weathered storms and has moments of wonderful joy, which is very special, he is indeed an immensely talented man. He has a very unique point of view and his insights are often of enormous benefit to me as I work.

CA __ You and Paul worked together on Jail Caesar, which is a very modern interpretation of the young years of Julius Caesar before his rise to power. Paul was the writer and director, and you were the producer. How was working with him?    

AK __ His work always pushes the envelope. It's never easy, but it gives you a huge amount of grist for the mill. It's meaty and full of substance, so you go on thinking about it. It was an extraordinary challenge because we shot with a handful of wonderful actors like Derek Jacobi and the great John Kani in three different working prisons. For example, in Pollsmoor prison, in Capetown, we were locked into a wing at nine o'clock in the morning and unlocked at one, and we just worked within that situation. The years I've spent working in prisons have been among the most inspirational moments that I've spent working in this industry. Incredibly moving, humbling, and inspiring. It was the first time I worked on a production as a producer, taking it right through to the festival and the marketing phase.

CA __ It's an incredible opportunity to share your work with the love of your life. Now you are starring in She Will. How would you describe this project?

AK __ When Charlotte Colbert, the director, and I were at the screening in New York, she said, “it's really a fairy tale.” And I think it's a perfect way of describing it. Someone recently told me there's the sub-genre emerging in the horror genre of what they call “folk horror.” I would say a film I was in, which I think is like She Will, is the remarkably beautiful Gretel and Hansel. It is like folk horror, like the stories that folk tell each other, rather than Chainsaw Massacre or such. So it's as if the character's internal landscape has an aspect of horror; what they go through is horrifying to them, and it is supernatural, I suppose. A psychological thriller deals with trauma, and trauma always has an element of horror in it. Whether that's post-traumatic stress from fighting in Afghanistan or Vietnam, or frankly, Ukraine, that to me is true horror, being on a battlefield with people torn up around you. This seems to be a kind of sub-genre that's emerging. So it's a story about a woman who, in the aftermath of very traumatic surgery, she's had a bilateral mastectomy, goes away to a retreat. She discovered as she's about to leave that a [film] director who directed her when she was 14 on a film set of her first movie, and it's never quite expressed, but whatever went down with him left her traumatized sexually and physically. And the trauma of the double mastectomy is compounded by discovering that this director is about to be knighted. And what's more, he's about to remake the same movie, and fourteen-year-old girls are queuing up around the block for the part. And she departs for this retreat in a remote part of Scotland and, by chance, where the retreat is being held is where the last two women were burned as witches in Scotland. Over about a hundred years, Scotland burned 2000 men and women, mostly women, for witchcraft; of course, their ashes are in the earth. The whole premise of the piece is that the ground retains the memory of these women being burned. And that actual ash, that what's left of their physical composition, is part of the Earth and its memory, and all of these traumas coalesce. She (Veronica Ghent) starts to have experiences in different dimensions. She shifts from dream to actual projection, who knows quite what it is, but she starts to find that she can manipulate current reality from this dimension. And the story moves on from there.

"You've got this beautiful little tree that you're growing, but if you keep on digging it up to look at the roots and it's never going to grow."

CA __ I'm thrilled you mentioned the parallels between your role as Holda the Witch in Gretel and Hansel and Veronica in She Will. You spoke about so many of the underlying themes of the movie She Will; when analyzing the movie, there seem to be many themes, not just reconciling past traumas and the supernatural gift of the earth retaining the memory of the world, but there are other themes like juxtaposition versus transposition, where sometimes things are opposite and then they become side by side, or they become each other versus who they [originally] were. There is an overlap between nature and the supernatural. There's also a reality versus dream state. So through it all, the film has a strong theme of duality. Sometimes it's about opposites. Other times, it's about sameness. So what were some of the most important chords that struck you in this film?

AK __ One that really touched me and was inherent in the script, but it really came out in the filming, was the relationship between the young nurse and Veronica, the bitter, angry, rude older woman. Veronica has dealt with her trauma by progressively keeping the world at a greater and greater distance. And she's developed an incredibly self-serving manner. She's obliged by her insurance company to have this young nurse. This young nurse has also suffered trauma, but her way of dealing with it is to reach out to others who are in pain as a nurse, and her sweetness and patience eventually break down Veronica's impenetrable exterior. And I think Kota Eberhardt does a genuinely exquisite performance [as nurse Desi Hatoum] because it's so delicate and nuanced that you don't see it happening until it's over. They start off about as far apart as they can possibly be. And by the end, they are deeply and profoundly connected to each other on so many levels. Veronica’s humanity has been so lost, and Desi offers her own humanity. I was so moved by that. And another thing moved me; I never had a scene where nature and the cosmos are made to be so potent and so vast. I think [the director] Charlotte and the cinematographer Jamie Ramsey realized it beautifully. There are so many images of us quite small in a vast landscape. I've never seen a film that looked at trees quite as closely or dirt, mud, or the Earth. I hope it reminds the audience of how precious the Earth is and how mysterious the whole of creation and the cosmos are. How potent, how precious, how extraordinarily mysterious are all the dimensions within the cosmos, and we're just a small part of it.

CA __ I noticed how Mother Nature is another force in this movie that goes to show that a key element of the film is the strength and bond of womanhood, whether it's the female characters or mother nature herself. So without giving away too much, can you tell us how womanhood, the bond and the strength of it, is a factor in this film? Not just between the nurse and your character, as there are other forceful women throughout the film.

AK __ There is a woman and a young girl present, and they are clearly fugitives; they're running, and you don't know what they're running from. You only discover this halfway or just a bit over halfway through that they are about to be captured and tarred, feathered, and burned as witches. And it seems that their spirits are still present. It is almost as if they've never been released from this realm, almost as if they're still present in those forests, because there is a moment when there is a bonfire, and all these women emerge from the flames. The film also has a point of view where a camera moves over the landscape. And eventually, you begin to think this isn’t the women's point of view. I think it's the point of view of Nature. We are contained within all of this, and it is Mother Nature. So it is not only the witches but Mother Nature at work here. And interestingly, for me, what Veronica wants, in the end, is not revenge but the truth. So she asks the director to tell the truth, and he can't. Malcolm McDowell does a remarkable performance because this is not obvious in the script, but it was something that I read in his performance. There's a moment when he's sitting alone, and he's got his head in his hand, and I think he recognizes who he is and what he's done. And a moment later, she appears before him, and he asks, “what do you want?” and she says, “I want the truth,” but he can't put it into words. If he had been able to say I'm sorry, who knows, the end might've been different. I think Mother Nature wants the truth. Always. I mean, the earth is truthful.

intense and focused because we had to be totally in each other's head space to shoot it so fast. We had no time to spare. We didn't have the luxury of many takes. We just had to get all the scenes in the can every day. And I just connected with both of them, which is wonderful, and Kota, of course, joined that space. It's a tricky space to describe. But all I can say is that I often felt as if I was dreaming, that it was kind of happening to me rather than me mainly doing anything.

CA __ The movie's opening line says, “It's become my ritual, putting on layers. Every mask has a function. This mask is about preservation.” From that opening line, there always seems to be a mask over everything throughout the film. And it reminds me of the poem We Wear the Mask by Paul Laurence Dunbar. It's that veil that masks, from the fog of the wilderness to the darkness of the film's lighting. There always seemed to be a mask on throughout the entire movie. It’s like you laid the groundwork from the beginning, from the opening line, and to see the progression where the film's final line is “What is reality? Where is it? Perhaps it's only ever a longing.” What message would you like to give, as Alice or Veronica, to women about this movie or life in general?

AK __ It is a meditation, really, on being alive and, I guess, being a woman, but being a human being. The other, and this is a much more explicit message. What you've referred to, I think, is like the deep content, the deep underlying substrate of the film. But as a very explicit message to women, although I think it applies to anyone, male or female or whatever gender you identify as, in the face of trauma, you need to rise like a phoenix from the ashes. I spoke to a very dear friend before I made the film who had gone through breast cancer. And I asked her if she could bear to talk to me about what it had been like. I Googled what women go through with breast cancer. I had read the comments on support group websites, but this friend actually told me in graphic detail what it was like for her. That's how she concluded the narration: “you’ve got to rise like a phoenix from the ashes.” And she did, and she's got huge courage as a woman. But I think to imagine that it is possible if you have had trauma in your life to hold that as a goal and an aspiration and a hope. It is a wonderful message: rise from the ashes.

Photography Kevin Sinclair, Stylist Newheart Z. Ohanian, Interview Carl Ayers, Makeup & Hair Adam Maclay, Photo Assistant Andrii Obolonchyk, Actress Alice Krige