WAMG Talks THE PRETTY ONE With Jenée LaMarque And Zoe Kazan

The all new comedy/drama THE PRETTY ONE is in theaters now, and in support of the movie I sat down with director Jenée LaMarque and star Zoe Kazan in a small round table discussion to talk about twins, the origin of the story, and the challenge of playing two different people who have similarities. Since I am an identical twin, I was curious about the research it took for Zoe to play both twins in a rather convincing way. Check it out below.

Written and directed by Jenée LaMarque, THE PRETTY ONE is a coming of age comedy about identity and loss and a wallflower who finally learns how to break out of her shell. In a balancing act of a performance, Zoe Kazan portrays twins Laurel and Audrey, most poignantly as a relationship blooms with her new neighbor (Jake Johnson). As Laurel begins to slip into the life she has always wanted but never thought was possible, she must decide between continuing her life as Audrey and revealing herself as the perfect fraud.

Melissa from WAMG: To start out, I guess I should say that I am an identical twin…

Jenée LaMarque: Wow!

Zoe Kazan: We have an expert in the house.

Melissa from WAMG: There were certain nuances that I found between the girls which I found relatable. For example, in the car scene where Audrey is angry with Laurel for getting the same haircut… I can relate to the desire to set yourself apart from your identical twin. I’m curious, how much research did you do when looking into the relationships of identical twins?

Jenée LaMarque: There were two parts to that. One was researching twins who have lost their twin, and what their experience had been in that process. There was a book that I had given to Zoe about first hand accounts about twins that had lost their twin at birth, or during childhood, or later in life, or when they were very old, and what their process was. So, there was that, and then there was also this great series of videos by – I’m sure you would love this – Candice Breitz. She’s a South African artist. What she did was she took identical twins and she interviewed them in the same location, in the same clothing, and asked them the same questions…

Zoe Kazan: … but separately.

Jenée LaMarque: … but separately.

Melissa from WAMG: Really?

Jenée LaMarque: Yeah, and then she spliced it together. It gives me goosebumps just thinking about it, because it was just really informative about how they form their identities based on the way that people would label them…

Melissa from WAMG: Absolutely.

Jenée LaMarque: … and in their lives, how they have to struggle against that. People would make these physical assessments of them to their face because they are searching for the differences between them so that they could differentiate between them. So yeah, we watched those. You should watch those and share them with your twin.

Zoe Kazan: They are really beautiful. They’re interesting to me because I have a sister that I am really close with, so there was a lot that I thought that I could instinctionally understand because there is this sibling that I am so close to, but there was this ocean of stuff that I thought was completely different. I was trying to come to that from an empathic place. You know, I was trying to understand what it’s like to grow up with someone that people would make assumptions about, and be looked at a certain way that I needed to understand before taking that leap.

Q: Did you have many rehearsals?

Jenée LaMarque: We did. The beginning of rehearsal was just us meeting. Six months before we started shooting we started meeting, and she’s like “Let’s go through the script like I’m a six-year-old”. We went through every single sentence and every single line to make sure we understood the intention and were on the same page. We were very much on the same page with that. Then we had rehearsals with other actors for about a week. Mostly surrounding her relationships with each of the other characters in the movie – including the body double that she ended up acting against in the scenes where she was playing both characters.

Melissa from WAMG: What made you decide to tell this story? What is the origin of THE PRETTY ONE?

Jenée LaMarque: Well, it was a confluent of several things. One was the loss of my best friend in my early 20’s. He died the week that we graduated college. You know, that’s a very unsure time in someone’s life. They just graduated. They don’t know what they are going to do with their life. It’s unsure, and then on top of that there was this great loss, and I, sort of, came of age through that loss in my 20’s – through the lens of that loss. He was a really funny guy – a hilarious person. He had cystic fibrosis, and so, the whole time I knew him he was dying essentially, but he had the most amazing sense of humor, and was dark, and morbid. So, I wanted to tell a story about the loss of someone close, and to me, this is the extreme of that circumstance. Losing your identical twin. Someone that you have been with since inception. But the story is essentially a coming of age story. Coming of age and learning to value yourself through loss. It sort of came though a very personal experience, even though it’s not directly autobiographical because that didn’t happen to me, but it’s true to my experiences as a young woman. That’s sort of the genesis of it. And I wanted it to be comedic. I wanted it to be a comedy because that’s just my sense of humor, and the way I sort of look at the world.

Q: Can you talk about casting a little bit, and what you found in Zoe?

Jenée LaMarque: Yeah. I think in that lead role, for me, it was important for that person to audition. It was such a tall order for a performer that I felt like, for my first film, I needed to have that insurance that they could, indeed, do it. It took about six months to cast the role, and I met with a lot of really wonderful actresses that auditioned, and it just never felt right. We were getting closer to when we wanted to start shooting, and we knew we needed to make a choice, but we were bummed out because we knew that we hadn’t met the right person. Then Zoe was in New York, but happened to be in LA for the week. I was really excited when they said that she was coming in because I had seen her work before. As soon as she walked in, that feeling of “your character is in the room with you” washed over – that intuition of “Oh, here she is!”. The thing that seemed so hard to cast was actually very easy. It wasn’t like we were just mulling it over between two people. It was “We need her and we will do everything that we can to get her!”. She just really nailed the tone, and brought – she’s a very gifted physical comedian. I knew, right away, when she came in.

Q: Zoe, what was your impression of the screenplay when you read it?

Zoe Kazan: I thought that it was unlike anything that I had read, which says a lot because we [as actors] read a lot of scripts. Sometimes people don’t write from their true voice. They are writing to get their script sold, or their movie made. They have an idea of what they think might be successful. I felt like this was Jenée’s real voice. I felt like I was meeting her by reading it on the page. I was very curious about who the person was that had written this. I didn’t feel like it unfolded for me in the first read, which was also a great feeling. Sometimes when you read something you think “Oh, I could act this tomorrow!”. That kind of project is more challenging because you can get bored with it really easily. The idea of reading something and going “I don’t know how I would do this” was really intriguing to me, and exciting.

Melissa from WAMG: What was the biggest challenge of playing two different people with similar personality traits? How did you balance the two characters?

Zoe Kazan: It’s interesting to me that you think that they have similar personality traits. I also think so, but I think that they are handling it in different ways. I think that Audrey has buried Laurel inside of herself. When we first meet her, she has taken all of the parts of herself that are awkward, or self evasive, or self loathing, and she has buried those deeply inside of herself. But, she’s not a perfect person, and she is having a lot of difficulty in her own life which we kind of fleshed out as we talked about it to give me a really strong sense of who she was, because you learn more about her over the course of the movie, but when we first meet her we see her through Laurel’s eyes. I think that Laurel is someone who has a lot of Audrey’s vivacity, and life-force, and confidence somewhere in herself, but it’s trapped underneath all of these layers of the roles that she has put herself in, and that her family has put her in – the way that she sees herself, and the way that the world has reinforced that sort of label. Unfortunately, I think that Audrey dies before she becomes a whole person, but then Laurel has this big journey where the parts of her that, I think, are like her sister get to come out. Allowing those parts to come out, she breaks free of this load that she’s carrying around. I think that the best way to approach that, for me, was to do so really technically. We talked about very basic physical differences between them, about the way that psychology has affected their bodies, how they carry themselves in the world… which is also what I saw in those videos that we mentioned earlier. Even though these were two people that were physically identical, they didn’t look physically identical to me because of the way that their personality came through… which is really interesting because that is, kind of, how I think about acting. It’s the same vessel every time. It’s you. It’s your body. It’s your emotions, but you’re putting it though this sieve, this different part that reshapes you. I think that I look very different from part to part based on what that part is, and what it requires. It’s not just hair and makeup. It’s also that characters spirit. It changes the way you look, and the way you look to the camera. I think I thought about it more as constructing these two separate people rather than trying to think of them as always in comparison with each other.

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THE PRETTY ONE is in theaters now