By: debbie lynn elias
Australian Sharni Vinson is a face you recognize and a name that is poised to take center stage. Slowly building a career with films like Step-Up 3D, Blue Crush 2 and Bait starring fellow Aussie, Julian McMahon (“the reason I took that movie”), Vinson embraces the athleticism and intelligence of the films and characters she takes on. Challenging herself by tackling a diversity of genres, she now enters the horror mainstream with Adam Wingard’s YOU’RE NEXT. A film that turns the genre on its head, this IS Vinson’s film. A home invasion turned ugly, Vinson is the film’s heartbeat; the blood cursing through its veins and pumping out on-screen at very turn.
Enthusiastic and excited about not only YOU’RE NEXT and her film career, but life in general, I sat down with Vinson in this exclusive 1:1 interview talking YOU’RE NEXT, Australia and, of course, stuntmen.
So, is everyone gonna think twice now before they try and break into your house?
[laughing] I think so! I’ve had some people on the street that have seen the movie come up to me and go, “Oh my God! You’re the girl that, that, that… I don’t want to be mean!” And they start walking away. It’s great!
This was an extremely physically demanding role for you. On a low budget film like this, there’s no time to be placing stunt people in and out, so I know that you were doing your own action. The way that Adam Wingard was doing the camera work, its clear that this is you on screen. This was not cut and paste designed to mask a stunt person doing the action and then doing an inset of a close-up of your face.
No, no! It’s all me. Part of the reason I booked this job is because I’m very connected with the stunt industry. A lot of my great friends are fantastic stuntmen and ever since meeting them 12 years ago, it’s been a passion of mine to pursue action and stunt careers. I just think it’s fantastic what they do. It’s so impressive and you never get bored around a stunt person. Never get bored! And my whole thing in life is, I get bored quite easily unless I’m changing it up and being physical all the time.
Plus, the added perk – aren’t stunt guys the best storytellers ever?
EVER! EVER! They have the BEST stories. It’s incredible. Just the other week I was with one of them in Hawaii and he went down a water slide, cut his head open and here I am with Super-Glu trying to put it back together. He’s like, “That’s okay. No worries. This is cool.” The guys are gutsy and that’s something they were after when they were casting this role [YOU’RE NEXT], is that same fire and believability. It’s tough that you get a female heroine in a horror movie and have them portray it as legitimately “tough”. That was the really important part to get in there. I’m lucky that I knew the right people and I had the right connections and had been physical enough in my time that I was given a chance.
With the horror genre so many people think of Jamie Lee Curtis who is a scream queen. She’s very good at screaming. Neve Campbell comes in a couple of decades later and she’s very good at screaming. But your character in YOU’RE NEXT is all about thinking intelligently and surviving and using what’s at hand. It’s like Buffy the Vampire Slayer fighting demons using everything at your disposal and you think it through.
Yep. And that was the main thing for me; not so much the physicality of the role which I feel like unknowingly I trained for, for 30 years of my life in just the sports that I’ve come through, but it was more the mentality of the character. She is smart and she has this, what I almost took as a sixth sense, so to speak. She’s the first person to hear a glass break and notice it and react. And her reaction time is quick. I had to give her the respect that somebody coming from a survivalist upbringing would have in dealing with these situations.
Because of the fact you’re from Australia, with the Outback and the country’s mythology, it’s considered a survivalist area and that almost automatically gives you an inherent (1) more believable sense of being a survivalist and also, (2) perhaps a little edge of some of the “wimpier” American actresses that might have auditioned.
[laughing] Well, as the director [Adam Wingard] puts it, “The bugs are bigger in Australia so we just appear tougher to the general community.” And I think that’s hilarious! The bugs are bigger. The crocodiles are bigger. The insects are bigger. They’re more scary. They’re legitimately more tough Down Under. I don’t know if that’s just his perception or if we have Steve Irwin, Croc Hunter, to thank for that stuff, but . . . I came in and auditioned as an American and they wanted the Australian thing. They loved it. They thought it seemed tougher and more apparent. One thing I think it does do is it keeps the mystery alive a little bit because Erin’s probably the last person you’d really expect, being the little slight one in the group, to turn around and be a cave woman doing these things. The fact that she is another nationality just adds the mystery to her background so when it’s explained it makes a little more sense. Americans are smart so to have the same story as an American and say, “Oh, I came from the Army boot camp or whatever the story was originally”, I don’t think [the audience] is gonna buy that as much as [a girl] who came from Australia and a survivalist compound. “Oh, okay. Australians are known in the general public to be pretty tough.”
What’s also interesting is that with the creation of Erin is that early on in your dialogue during the car scene with AJ Bowen and the two of you are driving to Crispian’s parents’ house for the weekend, there’s the exchange where you find out what his father does/did for a living. As you see things happening and other people showing up at the house, Erin doesn’t quite fit in with this very dysfunctional family, but there’s one line of dialogue and Erin’s displeasure about what the father does, sets it up so the suspicion falls on Erin initially and the mind starts reeling. Is this an inside job? Is Erin behind it? To then see the situation start turning and the characters seem to be second-guessing what’s coming next and what’s happening, it’s almost as if Erin knows something that the audience doesn’t. It’s very ambiguous but done with a wonderfully duplicitous edge. Very enticing.
It’s true. It’s true! AJ Bowen and I actually, on that line, have our own version of what the ending should be to the movie. We wanted to flip the whole thing where Erin and Crispian were responsible, together, for the entire massacre, but we didn’t win. [laughing]
[SPOILER ALERT] Instead we get Felix and Zee.
Yea. They’re the weird couple in the film. Geniusly played by my best friend and roommate, Wendy Glenn, who plays Zee. We’ve lived together for five years here in LA. It was just another experience to be able to work with your best friend and sort of play your camera opposites. She’s nothing like that role. [Wendy] is an English girl who’s just super, super sweet. She ain’t Gothic and she’s a mad [actress]. She’s just such a good actress and it was so much fun to be able to step onto set with your best friend and play these characters that are just, gritty. Really gritty. I would step into hair and make-up. And you’re used to stepping into a hair and make-up chair and walking out and you look in the mirror and go, “Is my make-up perfect?” You don’t care for this. This is like, you sit in there and say, “Mess me up as bad as you can. Make me look as really bloody and gory as whatever this character has been through is possible.” And then I look in the mirror and see all the scratches! I’ve never felt cooler! And more in line with the character with war wounds. You’re not worried about, “What do I look like right now?” It’s not about that. It’s about how am I going to get this moment across and make it the most believable for the audience to then respond to it. The whole movie was coming from a different place so hopefully that comes across.
One of the interesting things is that because the house is actually historic, a lot of the walls couldn’t be touched so fake walls had to be built. How did that impact you in terms of navigating and destroying things? Did you have to have an air of caution with certain movements, thinking, “Oh, I have to hit my mark here because otherwise I’m gonna break a 200 year old chandelier.”
Yea, we had some issues with the house. The house was picked for the film because it is so visually appeasing for what we were after. It really was that creaky. It really was that scary just to see it. I think that one of the crazy things was that when we were shooting, especially the big crazy dinner table scene where we’re utilizing 12 cast members and it’s mayhem. The table even gets flipped on its head at one point. And we’re not supposed to ruin the floors! How are we gonna do this? You’ve got one chance, one take. Once this is down, we’re not gonna re-set it. A lot of our shots in this movie were shot in the first and second take. That’s what you’re seeing. It’s very raw. We had to be very very mindful of the carpet. It just remember the “Don’t get blood on the carpet! Don’t get blood on the carpet!” And I’m like, “How are we not? There’s a blood rig up my neck and my head’s about to explode!” In the original ending, I die. So, there’s this huge blood rig where my head exploded. So, how are we not gonna get blood on the carpet? I don’t know how much money they owed in the end in damages, but it was probably worth it! [laughing] It was! It was worth it.
You’ve played in various roles over the years. You’ve done surfing in Blue Crush 2, danced in Step-Up 3D, and now you’re entering the horror genre with YOU’RE NEXT. And, of course, you did do Bait 3D with Julian McMahon.
Right! Yes! The big JM! He’s actually the reason I took that movie on, believe it or not. I knew he was attached and I said, “I want to work with him.” That was period, point blank, why I took the movie.
You’re not pigeon-holing yourself with career opportunities. You are very eclectic and very diverse in what you pick but with the roles you do pick, all of the parts are very substantive. Given that, what is the greatest gift that acting is giving you?
Right now, the biggest gift that it’s giving me is the opportunity to literally incorporate every skill or every passion that I had as a child which wasn’t just acting. I grew up a singer, a dancer, a swimmer, a surfer, a boxer, a virtual mermaid. I lived and breathed the ocean. So all these things, now, because of acting and the fact that you can pick all these different roles and portray all these different types of people, what I’m trying to do is put all my passions into these roles. Huge passion for horses. Huge. So, my next role I would love to be a western period piece with a gun and real action but on a horse through the countryside non-stop. I am a mermaid, put me in a mermaid role. I can hold my breath for 2 minutes. That’s really unusual that you can have an actor down there [underwater] for that amount of time and get those shots but I did 15 years of swimming. I’m trying to put what I can do into these roles. That to me never makes it boring. I’m just constantly challenging myself. I always said the day I stop having fun in this business will be the day I stop doing it. I’ll never stop having fun if I can continue bringing what I love into these roles. That’s what I’m really after.
Go check out Longmire, an A&E tv series. It’s a modern western but there’s horses and guns and western things. It got picked up for a second season and looks like a third is coming. Jimmy Muro does the cinematography and some of my friends who are old west stuntmen who worked with John Wayne are doing stunts on it. Lou Diamond Phillips is in it. I’m just sayin’!
*GASP* Just sayin’! I’m likin’ it!!!!
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