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A holiday from hell – or a life-changing memory to hold on to? It's a question at the heart of Charlotte Wells' enchanting debut feature film Aftersun. Her narrative swings between a young girl’s holiday to Turkey with her father and her adult self reminiscing on the experience in a powerful observation of perspective and grief.
Most of the story sticks with 11-year-old Sophie (played by Frankie Corio) and her troubled but devoted father Calum (Paul Mescal) on their sun-speckled trip. Imbued with nostalgic memories of package holidays, the pair play pool, sunbathe, and go scuba diving. However, cracks begin to emerge as Calum battles to keep his private life from his daughter – and Sophie wonders if she can ever really know her father.
Total Film recently got the chance to talk to Aftersun’s leads, Normal People’s Paul Mescal and his young co-star Frankie Corio, about the film. Speaking over Zoom, the pair’s relationship shines through as they reflect on making the movie, the different perspectives of their characters, and how they developed their father/daughter dynamic.
Total Film: I wanted to start by asking a bit about the father and daughter dynamic that the film hinges around. How did you develop that in the lead-up to filming?
Paul Mescal: Well, we hung out right? I think it's fair to say that those two weeks before filming were very fun. It was obviously outside the pressure of filming itself. The big surprise for me was not just that Frankie was obviously very talented and I knew that from the audition process, but being totally honest, I wasn't expecting to be friends with an 11-year-old.
Frankie Corio: I was 10 at the time when you met me!
Paul: You were 10 at the time? [laughs] I thought you said I was 10 out of 10. Sorry, you were 10 at the time.
Did that dynamic change at all while you were filming?
Paul: I think we got closer.
Frankie: Yeah, definitely. Then we were so close and I didn't get to see him, and then it was very sad.
Paul: It's always the hard thing at the end of filming, which is true in any job. But I think with something like this where it is I think a very intimate relationship and film, it's a hard thing to walk away from.
Paul, I wanted to talk a bit about how we see Calum in the film. We see him a lot through reflections: we see him on the TV screen, we see him in a mirror. How does that inform your acting? Is it quite a technical challenge to be aware of?
Paul: I think it probably is to an extent that I can't really remember. I think it impacts the viewing experience in a really interesting way but not the playing of it. I tried to be aware of the visual landscape of the film and how the director and the DP are shooting something, but I don't find it useful for it to impact it so much that you're aware of that process while you're doing it. I think it's important to read the room and understand where the cameras are and then let all that information out of your head when you're in the scene. I think what's useful about knowing that is I think we like shooting Calum through reflections or through mirrors are things that kind of keep you at arm's distance from the audience. That does an interesting amount of work for what you're doing as well as an actor.
It’s also where we start to see the cracks between the person he’s portraying and his private self. I mean, at times, he seems like such a wonderful father and then at other times, it's quite hard to not hate him, for example in the karaoke scene. How did you reconcile those different sides to him when you were playing him?
Paul: Well, it was important to myself and Charlotte that we both agreed that the thing that I think Calum is best at in the world is being a dad. So I don't know if I necessarily agree with hating him. Actually, I think it's a totally fair response, but I think my inclination when we see him fail was to feel a great deal of sympathy for him. Rather than judge him and dislike him or anything like that, it was trying to understand why he lets Sophie down at certain moments, and I don't think that's like a failure in him as a father. I think it's him struggling with what to me feels like the beginning or the center of a mental health crisis. And I find it deeply upsetting to see somebody be so good at being a father but being failed by his own mental inner landscape. That to me was the conflict of the character and probably the film to a certain extent.
Frankie, I was reading that the writer and director Charlotte Wells didn't give you the full script. She just spoke you through the different scenes before you film them. How did you find that?
Frankie: I mean, I found it all right. Obviously, I've never worked on anything before so I didn't know what to expect. It wasn't like I was expecting to get a script. And I feel like it's also better like that. I feel like if I was to read through the script and learn the lines, it wouldn't have made it as good as how I was in the film. Then I would overly practice the lines and I would have felt like a robot.
Paul: Charlotte and I tried to keep a lot of the kind of heavier stuff away from Frankie, as Calum would away from Sophie. So I think it was a surprise to see all of the heavier stuff that you haven't seen on set. [Doing this] was like when the game of acting mirrors real life, it’s really satisfying.
For more from Mescal and his co-star Corio, make sure to listen to the full interview on the Inside Total Film podcast, available on:
You can listen to our full interview with Aftersun stars Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio on our podcast, Inside Total Film. Aftersun is out in UK cinemas now.
