Shannon Murphy Wrote A Letter To Ben Mendelsohn Asking Him To Be In Her Movie Babyteeth
In the new drama, the Australian actor stars as Henry, the father of Milla, a schoolgirl who is battling cancer and befriends a drug addict and dealer named Moses.
Shannon knew the Captain Marvel star would be perfect for the role after she attended a Sia concert and saw him dancing in a video to accompany the singer’s performance of Breathe Me and personally reached out to him with a letter.
“It was such a tortured dance that he was doing in this piece that I remember just watching it crying, going ‘that is so profoundly moving’ and that sort of dance of pain is exactly what Henry’s inner world is, and so I thought, ‘He’s got to play Henry and now I’m becoming a bit obsessed with the idea so how are we gonna make this work?’” she said in an exclusive interview with Cover Media. “But then when I went to write the letter, I thought I’ve just got to tell him what really made me think this and I wrote all about that Sia performance.”
The Killing Eve director admitted that she wouldn’t let herself “get too committed to him” being in her film until he arrived for rehearsals because he was so busy and only had a small window of 10 days to shoot it in-between projects.
On his first day, the Bloodline actor gifted her a stuffed toy to ease any nerves she might be having about her feature directorial debut.
“He knew I might feel that way and so he gave me this little stuffed bilby toy, which is this really funny-looking animal that we have here in Australia,” she recalled. “It was really sweet and it was his way of saying, you know, he had my back and he was excited this was my first feature and he knew what a big deal that was for me, so that was lovely, I’ve still got that little bilby.”
Babyteeth is released in cinemas on 14 August.
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