The Secrets We Keep, out in theaters now before its on demand release of October 16, tells the story of a woman in post-WWII America. Based on the play Death and the Maiden, it follows Maja (Noomi Rapace) as she kidnaps and tortures her neighbor Thomas (Thomas) as payback for the crime she believes he committed.
Chris Messina and Amy Seimetz round out the stellar cast, portraying spouses who are more often than not left in the dark. The two actors spoke with Screen Rant about how they handled their characters and how they viewed Yuval Adler’s directing style.
This movie is killer intense, from top to bottom. I was clenched to my seat the whole time, and it's interesting because it kind of plays out almost like a stage play as well. Can you talk to me about the characters you play?
Amy Seimetz: Sure, I play Rachel. She is the wife of the man that Chris and Noomi kidnap, played by Joel Kinnaman. She's mostly in the dark for most of the movie, and Noomi's character befriends her.
But you learn pretty quickly that, actually, she wants to be kept in the dark. She doesn't want to know the actual truth about her husband, and what he's done. And she knows that there's something there, but she's willing to keep that bottled up.
Chris, how about yourself?
Chris Messina: I play Lewis, Noomi's husband in the movie. My character kind of acts as the audience, in trying to figure out and understand what the hell's going on. Who's telling the truth? Who's lying? What is this secret, and why has it been kept from me for this long?
I actually wanted to talk about that a little. Your character is in a vulnerable position because, out of the characters he interacts with the most, he's the one who's really in the dark about everything. Can you talk to me about how you approached that characterization?
Chris Messina: Yeah, I really loved playing him because I get cast as - if you do something halfway decent in Hollywood once, the imagination doesn't run that far. So, I was seen initially as a nice kind of guy, and I get cast a lot as that.
This is a nice guy who loves his wife and loves his family and he's a sturdy rock, but yet the circumstances are crazy and the stakes run high, so he's forced to make some massive moves and decisions quick. It was fun to see a character that was so steady and so moral have to question all that, and be brought down kind of to his knees.
But the prep of that was really just in the script. We had rehearsals, and we dug through together and figured out the best way to pace out the scenes as the stakes rose.
Amy, I wanted to talk to you about your director, Yuval Adler, because I really like that he keeps you guessing pretty much all the way into the very end. What methods did your director use to heighten the sense of realism during shooting?
Amy Seimetz: As a director, I try to ignore what he's doing technically. Because otherwise my brain will start going, "Are you sure about that angle?" But as an actor, he really - the scenes that I have with Noomi, we had rehearsals before, but also on set he won't stop until it feels real emotionally. I trust a filmmaker like that, where he's like, "I don't think we got it."
Especially because the scenes are so subtle and so quiet that getting that precision of a turn of a phrase, he allowed time and space for us to really hit it. But my scene partner Noomi is incredible. Even though our scenes are very quiet, she has just the flick of like an eye movement or just a corner of her mouth twitching. She's incredibly precise. And to play off of that is great. That's what Chris and I sort of live to do as actors.
Key Release Dates
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The Secrets We Keep
Release Date:2020-09-16
