By Gill Pringle
If Angelina Jolie is still one of the most bankable action stars in the business, then she met her match with co-star Medina Senghore, making her big screen action debut with Taylor Sheridan’s high-intensity thriller, Those Who Wish Me Dead. What’s more, Senghore performed many of her stunts on horseback while shooting a rifle with a pregnant prosthetic belly strapped to her tummy. Not that there’s any competition between the two actresses – who actually don’t share any scenes – with Jolie portraying an elite firefighter suffering from recent trauma while Senghore plays a pregnant wife fighting for the life of her unborn child and her husband, played by Jon Bernthal.
A Harvard-educated successful patent lawyer, Senghore tells FilmInk how she came to acting later in life after she could no longer turn her back on an all-consuming passion for drama, winning a place at New York’s elite drama school, Julliard. “I absolutely loved law so I don’t regret the circuitous path that I’ve taken to get here because, if I hadn’t, I’m not sure if I’d be sitting where I am now. It’s been interesting just feeding all the different sides of my personality, and I feel like this career allows me to use every part of myself. The parts which were missing before are now getting fed.”
As a mum-of-two in real life, she had the pregnancy part nailed, but knew that she would have to train hard for the high-octane action style of director Taylor Sheridan, who penned Sicario and Hell Or High Water, directed Wind River, and created the popular TV drama Yellowstone. “My goal was to just be ready for anything, because the script had so much physical stuff in it,” Senghore explains. “I know how much action there is in Taylor Sheridan’s movies and how he strives to make things as real as possible so I did horse-training and gun-training. I’d never held a weapon before in my life so Taylor hooked me up with some great training and I got my shoulders ready to hold that weight. By the time we got to set, I felt confident. Personally, I just wanted to be as strong as possible because I wanted to be able to jump in there and try as much as I could myself.”
Impressed by Taylor’s desire to showcase this unique portrayal of a kickass pregnant woman, she says that “one of the things that excited me about this so much is that it’s not a portrayal of a pregnant woman that you frequently get to see. And yet there are pregnant women winning sports tournaments and working as first responders and just everyday taking care of a family and commuting to work and trucking groceries and all those things. It’s a testament to how much Taylor Sheridan respects women that he wrote this character.”
Likewise, Angelina Jolie is also a fan of the director, who is lauded for telling stories that feature intense action in the middle of the American wilderness while also combining pacing, tension, character development and action sequences. “Very few filmmakers today tell a beautiful, meaningful story with such grit and wild abandon, humour and action as Taylor,” Jolie offers. “Because he directs and writes, you come out with great characters, story, and soul. He has a genuine signature.”
Just as Senghore was drawn to this portrayal of a strong woman, so was Jolie. “I’m always drawn to the strong female characters, but it really doesn’t matter that my character is female; it’s not about the fact that she’s a strong woman or a woman at all. I like roles like that, and I liked that it also connects to the people of service to America, telling their story,” says the Oscar-winning actress, who portrays Hannah, an elite “smokejumper” firefighter still reeling from the loss of three lives she failed to save from a fire. “Hannah has experienced a real tragedy, and she feels responsible. When we meet her in the story, she is having nightmares, and she suffers from PTSD. She puts on a brave front and acts cool, but inside she’s a broken person who carries a great deal of guilt.”
Whether that guilt is warranted or not, Sheridan says that “smokejumpers do exactly what their job sounds like: they jump out of planes and get into these roadless areas behind fires and either set back burns or cut breaks and try to control and shift and move the fire into a place where it can go out. It’s an incredibly dangerous job, and one that involves a lot of courage. When the least dangerous thing you do is jump out of a plane on your way to work, it takes a certain type of person that’s really eager to push themselves and find out what they’re made of. Hannah fits into that category; she is willing to risk her life.”
Jolie’s character is indeed in a fragile state when we meet her, but she soon finds herself faced with saving a young boy from the twin dangers of encroaching wildfires and relentless hitmen, and jumps into high gear. “Hannah is an adrenaline junkie,” says Jolie. “Anybody that does this job has to be, or you wouldn’t jump out of a plane and into a fire. I am drawn to characters who have been through something and are broken and then find their way forward and overcome it. As an artist, it’s very healing to play people like that because you see that if you can do that in character, you can do that in life. It feels good, and you hope that the audience gets that same feeling and that same reminder that we can all stand back up.”
Hannah’s work is very physical, and Sheridan knew that Jolie would be up to the task. “Angie was game, and she did a lot of her own stunts,” the director explains. “It’s a requirement of the way that I film because I try to place the audience as a voyeur right in the middle of the action. If it’s not the actor, they’re going to see that, so it requires a real physical commitment.” Jolie adds: “I was happy to toughen up and get dirty and sweaty, and to do things that I’ve never done and feel very capable. Taylor taught me how to chop wood and start a fire. Now he needs to teach me how to ride a horse!”
Admittedly, Jolie could not have done her job so well without finding the perfect young co-star in Brisbane’s fourteen-year-old Finn Little, who made his big screen debut four years earlier in Storm Boy. Portraying a boy on the run from relentless hitmen, Little’s Connor melts the heart of Jolie’s firejumper, stirring her out of her own feelings of self-pity as she realises that she is the only person who can save him from the dual dangers of encroaching fires and gun-toting killers, portrayed by Aidan Gillen and Nicholas Hoult. “Connor has lost his mum, so his dad is everything to him, and one day as they’re driving to school his dad sort of freaks out and just pulls out and they leave town,” the actor explains. “Then his dad is hurt and Connor’s most scared of being alone, and having no one.” As their characters encounter each other for the first time, Little says that “at first, he doesn’t really trust Hannah, but Connor changes his mind when they get to know each other. She starts to understand what he’s like and what he’s been through, and how to treat him.”
If their characters are initially mistrustful of one another then, off-screen, Little is clearly enamored of his co-star: “She was very happy and supportive of me on set, but as soon as the cameras turned on, she had to play a whole different role because Hannah is not a motherly figure.” There’s a funny line in the film where Jolie’s Hannah is snacking on a bag of stale chips, prompting Little’s character to cheekily observe, “No wonder you’re so skinny.” “We didn’t improvise because it was actually a line from the script,” he says, “but we had a couple of good laughs about it afterwards.” Mostly he wishes that he could work with Jolie again. “She’s a great screen partner and really fun to work with. We had some great times on set and she’s really humble and was very nice to me.”
Those Who Wish Me Dead is in cinemas now. Click here to read our review.
