Among the latest of the 2024 movies is His Three Daughters, which brings together a trio of talents with Elizabeth Olsen, Natasha Lyonne and Carrie Coon playing sisters. Just ahead of the movie’s premiere at Toronto International Film Festival and its current place in select theaters, CinemaBlend spoke to the three actresses about their prior experiences as theater actors.
I seriously could have seriously listened to these ladies swap stories for hours! A clip of our conversation is above. I loved what each of them had to say about how their time in theater has changed the way they have approached their movie and TV careers over the years. Let’s start with Elizabeth Olsen’s answer:
Mine is being backstage. I was doing a workshop of a play for like three nights and I was backstage. It was the first event. I was 19 years old and everyone was in their thirties, and we were on our way downtown New York City and there was a door that I had to enter. And I was standing back there and I was so freaked out 'cause I was with all these professionals and I'm just in school and I had all these things going on in my head and I was running through my lines hoping I wouldn't forget them in the first scene. And I was like ‘All you have to do is walk through the door’ and like that shift of thinking… [of] nothing else matters. And it's so simple. You leave yourself and you enter this other person, and that's why we do this. [Laughs]
Elizabeth Olsen is undoubtedly most known for playing Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch in the MCU, which she has recently talked bluntly about. Before all that, she had one of her earliest roles in a New York production, as she spoke to in our interview. At the time, she recalls being very nervous and stressed out about performing live, but once she broke down what she needed to do, everything clicked in. Natasha Lyonne, who Olsen recently said “needs no advice” in her upcoming MCU debut, also shared her own memorable theater experience, saying this:
As a child actor, who was just sort of winging, it wasn't until I did theater that I fully understood the concept of the present moment. I think 'cause I'd only understood things at first, you gotta get it right or don't mumble or, later sort of like ‘be funny’. I remember one moment being on stage with Ethan Hawke in a play called Blood From a Stone. And I took a bite out of a sandwich that I made and like my person left my body because when I came back I was actually eating and I was like, ‘Oh, a third person made this’ like the character,
Natasha Lyonne recalled doing the off-Broadway production back in 2010 that helped her unlock a new aspect of what it’s like to really be an actor that she had never understood prior. It’s pretty wild when you think about the story considering Lyonne’s credits go back to the ‘80s when she was a child actor. As she spoke to, being on stage with Ethan Hawke made for a core memory for her that she takes with her today. As she continued:
And Ethan looked at me, who does so much theater and he had those sparky eyes on him because we were playing siblings. And he's like, ‘Oh, you just ate the sandwich, didn't you?’ Because a play is such a weird, tiny container where you're doing it every day. And he's like, ‘Ah, look, look, the first time the baby actually ate the sandwich!’ And then we kind of walked off and we're sort of Ethan and Natasha again for a second before falling back in. But, I was hooked on that, then.
Then there’s Carrie Coon, who recently was part of the cast of Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, who has done a ton of theater over the years. Here’s what she had to add to the conversation:
I was so young. I was such a good girl and such a straight A student. And, the other actor was just like, he goes, ‘You know, you can let it go a little bit more. And I was like, ‘yeah, yeah, it’s like, I know what you mean. I know what you mean. Yes. I understand.’ And then that night I really did kind of drop knowing what was coming next in a way that I really hadn't done before. 'cause I was still controlling it, still. And, it was the first time I really, like, lost control.
It’s so lovely to see these three women talk about the shared moments that made them think about acting in a new way and how it happened on stage for each of them. It’s a perfect conversation for them to have for His Three Daughters, because the drama really feels like a play in a lot of ways as their characters navigate taking care of their father, who is in hospice.
His Three Daughters is in theaters now and you can watch these three in the film with your Netflix subscription starting September 20.
