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Wes Bentley Stalks P2
By Fred Topel | Image property of Summit Entertainment.
Some movies try to explain all the reasons that killers go crazy. That's all well and good for Silence of the Lambs and Saw, but sometimes it's scarier not to know. In P2, Thomas (Wes Bentley) just traps his obsession (Rachel Nichols) in the parking garage. Even Bentley kind of winged it.
Wes Bentley on P2
"I didn’t do anything extensive," said Bentley. "Usually, when I’m there doing it, that stuff is in my head. I don’t do any writing about it or anything like that. The way I approach a character is I kind of open myself up and let myself go, all my issues, all the things I deal with and kind of rent out my body to the character. Those kind of issues are there but I don’t treat them as essential because we don’t treat them as essential. You don’t think about those kinds of things. You don’t think about what makes you this way or that way. In a way, that’s judging. You can’t judge a character. You can’t say he’s good or bad. You have to let it be the way it is. Otherwise, you do a caricature I think."
Actually, that may be oversimplifying. Bentley did imagine Thomas's past, but just never locked down a single one. "I don’t think like that but, at the same time, those things are there. He has his background. I can feel it and have a sense of it. Sometimes I thought he was a foster child, at times I felt like he had a too overbearing mother. I didn’t really know. I think he might have been such a compulsive liar that he didn’t know any more. Every psychological problem there is, he definitely had. That includes pathological liar, sociopath. When we were doing it, I could name them all. Again, those are things you can’t think about when you’re acting."
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The only scene that Bentley really prepared for was a dinner table scene where Thomas forces Angela to dine with him. That was also the first scene they shot. "That's right, first three days were that. Three days. Three days, one scene. But that was my favorite scene because it's all dialogue and a lot of play between us. And she's such a great actor that I really, really enjoyed it. It was tough again but that's part of what I loved. That'd be my favorite scene. The rest is just basic action. We really only rehearsed that scene because it's so integral to the movie. Without that scene, there's no relationship between us. You would just have my obsession over her which is cliché. But with that scene comes the intricacies and nuanced things that make you nervous about him or make you want to support her, come from that."
There are plenty of movies about innocent victims trapped in confined spaces by crazy bad guys, but Bentley found P2 stood apart from the others. "It's so original and because it avoided cliché, in this genre it's so easy to go cliché, that's lazy, because it didn't I thought there was even more to avoid it. So that seemed to me perfect for me because they'd allow me to play. So a lot of it's writing, a lot of it's me going further with it or Thomas being allowed to be more that way. It really fit and Frank [Khalfoun] did a great job creating an environment. It was a tough shoot though. We were all very type A personality and all had great visions. They clashed but at the same time it creates something beautiful. Big bang."
P2 opens to theaters tomorrow, November 9th.
For the trailer, poster and more movie info, go to the P2 Movie Page.
Fred Topel
Sources: Image property of Summit Entertainment.
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