I’m attempting to catch up on the back log of articles and interviews to come out in the last couple of months and found this gem! This is an excerpt from a much longer interview with Thomas’s Angels Crest co-star, Lynn Collins (his ex-girlfriend, Cindy) and director Gaby Dellal. They have plenty of wonderful words to describe Thomas!

CS: …could you talk about the casting for roles like Thomas and others?
Dellal: It was really hard to find the perfect Ethan, and I really did comb the country, and I saw English actors and Welsh actors and American actors and actually, Thomas (Dekker) was the last person that I met, and in fact, Lynn was already on board and auditioned with him, and there was just an amazing chemistry between the two of them and there was just something that… I mean, he’s an amazing young boy. What I was really keen on was youth and innocence and naivety, and I think we got that in spades with him, not only visually, but he had to imagine what it was like to have his own child, which is a really hard thing to imagine.

CS: How old is he?
Dellal: When he shot it, he was 21, so he is a very young boy, but I think a bit like Lynn said, he had to go to those places, to find an emotional honesty, to fulfill character and the character’s journey that he was playing, and I think both with Lynn and with Thomas, they’re both such brittle, amazing actors, that you just have to touch them and their whole body flinches and exposes what’s going on inside. They’re both very bright and intuitive, so what was really hard was orchestrating the pain and knowing that this film just couldn’t be filled with endless tears, because there’s a limit to how much crying you can watch on screen. With all the actors, they were all imagining what it would be like, and even the characters around the main two characters, Lynn and Thomas, as characters they were empathizing to such an extent with a member of their community who was going through the worst possible tragedy, that you imagine its use, initially for the first few weeks where it’s raw, and so it was really hard and there was a lot in the editing process to take out. But I kind of knew it from when I started, when I wanted somebody to lose it and when I wanted the focus to be on somebody more outside. It’s just the nerves that get touched in everybody at different times when you just lose it, so Jeremy Piven, just right at the end. He’s just a bombastic, battling through. He’s like a klutz when he arrives; he drops things all the time. He’s completely not liked within the community because he’s there to stir things up, and right at the end, just when he realizes (something that’s a plot spoiler), he just dissolves, and it’s because he has a backstory which we never touch on, but it’s just orchestrating when everybody loses it, when each person loses it and giving enough space around them for us the audience to care when Lynn loses it. And the trajectory of their pain was really interesting, how to orchestrate it.

 CS: I especially wanted to ask about Thomas’ character Ethan who is very young, and I was curious about that decision.
Dellal: He’s older in the book.

CS: I was wondering if there was any mention of how Ethan and Lynn’s character ended up having a kid together in the book because he’s so much younger. I expected she slept with him while she was drunk or something.
Dellal: He’s much older and I can’t even remember what happens between the two of them in the book. We made (the backstory) up for ourselves what happened, and I always had it in my head that she was a woman who came to town, seduced the most beautiful boy around, he actually fell very in love with her, and they had a huge connection. She gets pregnant and he then grows up before his time and has to take responsibility for the child, and I think that to already have your child taken away from you, however inebriated you are and however much in a fog, is like a knife in a woman’s heart, and then to have your child taken away again and you this time not being directly responsible. And she lost any potential love she had for this young boy. Lynn was going through such inordinate amounts of pain that you’re right. In the playing of it, she also went through a lot of hard soul-searching, like enormous amounts and it was very difficult to come through it.

Collins: Yeah.

Dellal: What I was intrigued by Thomas was the notion of a baby losing a baby and the idea of a father, and I thought people would think if you lose a child at 21, it’s not as bad, because you’re probably a bad father, and so it would’ve been much harder had he been a proper father. So then I thought, “What is a proper father? What is a proper mother?” There isn’t a proper anything. We’re animals and we have children and we look after our young and some of us do it really badly, some of us do it really well, too well and ruin the child, so that’s the circumstances. For me it was an analogy that there are no rules as to who can father and mother, so that’s why I wanted this very young boy, because I think the consensus then is really more interesting, because even though you shouldn’t diminish his pain because of his youth, even though you shouldn’t, you probably in a nonchalant way, do. You go, “Well, he’s a baby.” I have a scene where they’re playing PlayStation, because you just do the same things that you did and for Thomas or Ethan, it was on a Thursday night, all his mates came around and they played PlayStation and talked crap. But this guy was going through the worst possible agony he could ever, and in the end, it ruined him. Lynn Collins’ character is the only character that I believe in some way grew or strengthened as a result of the tragedy. She started off at the darkest possible part of her life, and then it felt like there was some sort of light for her, but I also think that Ethan, even though he comes to a dark ending, for me as the filmmaker and storyteller, I believe that was the only light he could seek.

Collins: I sort of went backwards and let the work… we had such an incredible audition experience with Thomas when he came in and I read with him. Gabby wasn’t there, and we just had this really attentive collaborative moment with each other, and it made everything that we did in the film super-easy, and made it work, and the sort of camaraderie we felt. The last thing I want to say about it from my perspective as an artist, is that I hope that as people watch this film that the sadness is transformative, that it’s not a blanket, that is something that will move people forward.

– Read the full article at Coming Soon; article by Edward Douglas.