‘I don’t want to do the same thing over and over again’: Stacy Martin on risky roles, tequila at the Oscars and her Jurassic Park dream | film

STessie Martin is “not a religious person.” However, the actress insists that things happened in her life that made her realize that there was a “whole range of things that can’t be explained.” One day, at her home in north London, she noticed a light bulb flashing. You couldn’t solve the puzzle: No matter how many times you changed the light bulb, it kept flashing. Instead of turning to the Internet, Martin went to see her psychic, a tea-leaf reader she meets annually, and who holds his place under a fake name.

The psychic suggested that someone was trying to contact her. “I was like, ‘What if I started talking to this person who seemed to want to talk to me?’” Martin says. “So I did. And that light never flashed again.” Martin prefers not to use the word ghost, but she realizes that there are things that the mind cannot comprehend; Things the body knows one way or another.

In her new film, Ann Lee’s Testament, her body is a vessel for the divine. Mona Fastvold’s wild musical tells the story of an 18th century religious leader and mother of four who swore sex with her husband but surrendered her body to God. Anne Lee (Amanda Seyfried), founder of the Shakers, expresses her devotion through song and dance, as she writhes, shakes, and shivers her way to redemption. Martin plays the lead role as Jane “Mother Jane” Wardley, the leader of the Shaking Quakers and the woman “who showed Anne Lee who she could become,” Martin says.

Co-written by Fastvold’s partner Brady Corbett (director of The Brutalist) and scored by Academy Award-winning experimental musician Daniel Blumberg, the film features Celia Rolison Hall’s hypnotic, ecstatic choreography and is unlike anything you’ve seen before.

Since her breakout role in Lars von Trier’s film Nymphomaniac In 2013, Martin worked with art provocateurs including Michel Hazanavicius, Ben Wheatley and, on three different occasions, Courbet. On screen, the half-French, half-British actor and model is very intelligent, and sometimes a bit tough. “No one would ever think of me being in a musical, so I love the idea of ​​pushing the envelope,” says Martin.

Bare-faced and wrapped in a fuzzy gray jacket, she calls by video from her home office in Beachwood Canyon, Los Angeles, which looks like an oak-paneled library. “A lot of my books are still in London,” says Martin, who now lives between the two cities and is considering whether she should simply buy all her books twice. “Is this outrageous?” She asks, furrowing her eyebrows. “I think it is.”

Martin is quick-witted and has a surprisingly dry sense of humour. Recently, she began reading “The Great Autobiography of David Lynch” and began studying quantum physics. “Some of my dear friends love it and I have no idea what they’re talking about, so I try to take it in.”

When she was researching the Shakers, Martin found little information about mother Jane, except “what she says to Ann Lee about not having relations with her husband.” Today, the Shakers are known for the integrity of their simple wooden furniture. But the dwindling Protestant community is also famous for its celibacy, with only three members remaining alive today. Martin was amused by the apparent contrast between her character’s chaste marriage and her passionate spiritual dreams. “For a movement to be so profound, and about catharsis and worship…I was quite surprised that she decided not to have sex with her husband,” she says with a laugh. But Martin was interested in the idea of ​​abstinence as an effective form of power. “At the time, it probably made sense for women because it was the only way they could gain status,” she says. The Shakers believed in gender equality, so by removing desire, “it wasn’t about women and men being part of the hierarchy that I thought gender would always be.”

She was also curious about the vibration. She was fascinated by the “soft violence” in Rawlson Hall’s expressive and instinctive choreography. Learning the film’s dance scenes during a two-week training period was “like summer camp,” she says. “Not that I’ve ever been to summer camp before.”

Martin first met Fastvold in 2015’s Freeze Budapest while filming Corbett’s first film, The Childhood of a Commander. The pair direct their own films but write together and work with a frequent group of collaborators. “In French, it’s a band“The band, that feeling of working with the same people, in a space where you’re pushed because they all know you so well,” Martin says, slipping into a perfect tone. “Fastfold and Corbett’s band includes Martin, Bloomberg (Martin’s former partner of 14 years), who scored The Covenant of Ann Lee as well as The Brutalist, Rawlson Hall (who also choreographed Natalie Portman in Corbet’s Vox Lux) and actor Christopher Abbott, who plays Ann Lee’s vile husband Which appeared in all their films.

Fastfold and Corbett “get along very well,” Martin says. “They are both committed to writing a story bigger than themselves, which also seems very close to their hearts.” In The Will of Ann Lee, Martin believes Fastvold explores her relationship with motherhood. “Not just in terms of having children, but also creating a space for people to flourish, for artists to come together and be greater than what society told them to be.” A natural mother and “force of nature” on set, Fastvold has also spent the past decade as a sort of mother figure to Martin. “She met me when I was a child! I was in all their films, I lived with them, and they lived with me. I saw their daughter grow up,” says Martin. “She realizes that sometimes there’s no solution, we just need to hustle. That’s a great friend to have.”

The Brutalist was arguably the surprise darling of last year’s awards season and went on to win three Oscars. Martin says the film’s success was a validation of “all the decisions and instincts I had made about filmmakers.” The actress, by her own admission, has actively pursued a career in independent cinema. After Nymphomaniac, “Making sure I worked with artists and worked on director-led films was a big thing for me,” she says.

It was a particularly special moment, then, when at the end of The Brutalist’s long awards campaign, Martin attended the Oscars with Fastfold and Corbett. “They give you alcohol under your seat — I think it was tequila,” she says, her voice deadpan. “It’s helpful to keep people’s spirits up, because it’s so long.” She says the party scene was a little weird, but it was fun to watch. “I just thought: ‘Maybe you’ll never come back, so make the most of it,'” she says.

Via email, Fastvold describes Martin as a “true cinephile” with an “instinctive understanding of the larger vision of film.” Martin is a regular at East London’s Close-Up, a small cinema and lending library off Brick Lane, and collects DVDs. “There was a wonderful man in Stoke Newington,” she says, who ran The Film Shop, a video and DVD rental shop specializing in world cinema. “It was all from the Criterion Collection and Second Run. I would go there and pick up a movie from a director I knew and then he would recommend another one. It was so great,” she says sadly. “I really liked her rituals.” When the store closed, she became so frustrated that she ended up buying half the store. “I was like: What are you going to do with all these movies?!”

Last year, growing impatient between projects, Martin wrote and directed her first short film. “I didn’t realize, as an actor, how sheltered you are from the whole experience.” Being behind the camera “was like an on-set experience on steroids,” she says. One of her upcoming films, The Queen of Fashion, about pioneering fashion editor Isabella Blow, will see her step into designer Daphne Guinness’ hoof-shaped platform shoes. When Blue died, Guinness bought almost all of her clothes. Guinness provided its archives for the production. “We had original McQueen pieces, we had a Philip Treacy lobster hat, we had original Marc Jacobs pieces that still had the soup on them,” she recalls.

“I don’t want to do the same thing over and over again,” Martin says. Over the summer, she filmed a studio adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, in which she played Jane Austen’s formidable villain Fanny Dashwood. She never shied away from Hollywood blockbusters, but “they never came to me,” she says. Now that she has made an enviable career in the Indies, the trend is firmly in her sights. She’s still only 35 years old, and she’s “trying to make her presence known in the next Jurassic Park.” This was the first film she had seen in the cinema, and it amazed her. “If you say enough, it’s bound to happen.”

The Covenant of Ann Lee is released in UK cinemas on 2 FebruaryFebruary 7.