Asteroid City Interview: Maya Hawke & Rupert Friend on Wes

ComingSoon’s Jonathan Sim spoke with actors Maya Hawke (Stranger Things, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) and Rupert Friend (Obi-Wan Kenobi, Pride & Prejudice) about their performances in the upcoming Wes Anderson movie Asteroid City.

“The itinerary of a Junior Stargazer convention is spectacularly disrupted by world-changing events,” reads the film’s synopsis.

Jonathan Sim: This is a film that you guys worked on with Wes Anderson, and I wanted to ask, what is it about Wes Anderson’s directorial style that made you want to work with him and what separates him from other directors that you’ve worked with?

Rupert Friend: Well, he’s one of the few kind of true auteurs I think we have currently working in as much as he envisions the whole thing but also wrote it. And he writes beautifully. So his scripts start out as an incredibly enticing prospect. But his specificity, his vision, and his passion for the work are unflagging. So, in any moment, if we’ve done something 50 times, or it’s day 75, or it’s a hundred degrees out, he is just as excited as he was on day one. And that is infectious and impossible to ignore.

Maya Hawke: And it’s like he has this, this joy to his films and to the process of making them that is what I’m looking for in life.

What is the most memorable experience that you guys had while you were filming Asteroid City?

Rupert: I mean, I don’t know if I could say there was one. I think the whole experience is just holistically incredibly rewarding, you know, to be with this group of people, making this particular film during a very difficult time for everyone and trying to find some meaning in quarantine. And the film has some elements of quarantine about it, but not in a depressing way, in a very uplifting way.

Maya: I think [Rupert was] still there, but I ended up staying till the very last day of shooting. And when they were closing down Asteroid City, I biked there, and like, it had been kind of packed. A lot of stuff had been packed away already. And I just like walked around and looked at every detail of every prop. And I was all alone in Asteroid City, which I hadn’t been up to that point. And that, weirdly, I think, is the thing. I really definitely will never forget that moment.

Asteroid City is this interesting cosmic movie that deals with things like aliens and stuff like that. So if an alien ever actually arrived on Earth, which movie or show of yours would you wanna show the alien to paint everything about you in the best possible light?

Maya: Well, I definitely feel like if I wanted an alien to paint me in the best possible light, I wouldn’t show them any of my work. I would like, want ’em to like read my diary or like watch from space while I had a long conversation with my brother. Like, I’d want them to see me be a human. Or maybe I’d want ’em to listen to one of my records. That’s, like, probably the thing that I’d want too, that would know the most about me. Maybe this movie too, not ’cause it’s about me, but because I’m so proud to have been in it, but I don’t know, you know. It’s funny, acting is so funny in that way ’cause it reveals so much about who you are and you’re not being yourself. So no one really gets to know you at all watching you act. Or at least actors like us, maybe.

Rupert: No, I agree. I agree. I think it would be a way to talk about other ideas, but I don’t think you get a sense of who any of these people are from the characters that they’ve played, maybe in any film. I don’t know. Yeah.

And so is there any particular performance that you guys have given in your careers that you feel maybe went under the radar that you would want a lot of people to kind of check out if they haven’t already?

Maya: Anything I did that went under the radar, I don’t want anyone to see.

Gotcha. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Got it.

Rupert: To be honest, I don’t even know what went under or over what radar, so I don’t follow my own career that closely. (laughs)

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