English actor Joanna Scanlan stars alongside Peter Mullan (My Name is Joe, Top of the Lake) in new short film Don vs Lightning.
It’s "based on a true story", in which an elderly Scottish grump finds himself the victim of multiple lightning strikes.
The comedy is one of 75 hand-selected short films from around the globe being screened as part of the Show Me Shorts Festival kicking off this month.
Scanlan tells Kim Hill it was one of her dreams to work with co-star Peter Mullan.
"It was an utter joy to have those few days making Don vs Lighting which was tremendous fun."
Joanna Scanlan in Don Vs Lightning Photo: Screenshot
Scanlan will also be popping up on our screens in the near future in The Larkins, a reboot of popular ‘90s British comedy The Darling Buds of May, which was based on the H.E. Bates’ books of the same name.
She says if someone had told her back when she first read the books as a teen that she'd play the main character in the future, she would've fainted.
"My mum gave me this set of six books and I absolutely devoured them, I loved them and they meant a great deal to me, so much so that I haven't really watched the TV show in the early '90s which was of course hugely successful in the UK.
"I loved what the characters stood for, so when they were doing a remake and I went to talk about maybe being able to play wonderful Ma Larkin, it felt like some kind of loop, some piece of extraordinary closure.
"It was a real delight - the show, the shoot, the script."
While the '90s show had a type of nostalgia that most at the time would relate to their memories of the '50s, this version encompasses modern and gritty stories with a hint of nostalgia, she says.
"It's quite an idealised universe but it's also got some grit and some fun and I really hope people will take it to their heart and enjoy it.
"I think [writer Simon Nye] has done an amazing job of bringing what is modern day Britain into what H.E. Bates was talking about in the [1958].
"The truth is the book themselves in the late '50s, when they first came out and into the early '60s, were themselves very modern and were quite racy, they weren't nostalgic and I think the spirit of that has remained in Simon's re-envisioning of it now."
Another work from Scanlan that New Zealand viewers can look out for is the film After Love, which has received rave reviews.
She plays an English Muslim convert who discovers her husband's secret life after he dies.
Scanlan says it was a lovely experience to play a role that had no comedy in it for a change.
"I'm not sure it's in my nature [to be comedic], I mean I do find life amusing, particularly the worse it gets.
"But essentially I feel like a serious person so it was nice to not have to even think about making this work comedically because often that's quite a technical process and just allow myself to be in this extraordinary character of Mary and the journey she goes on."
The character draws on writer and director Aleem Khan's mother, who married a Muslim man and converted to Islam, she says. But the story itself is not based on his mother's life.
"I met her and talked to her a lot, I think she's one of the most inspirational women, she really was just amazing talking about her life.
"I kind of went on my own research, spending time with as many Islamic women as I could find locally and working in the local mosques and so forth. And it was really wonderful actually and something I would never have had the chance to do had I not been asked to be in the film."
Having been brought up as a Catholic, she says she called on her own sense of faith to help play the role.
"I think it's very interesting what you bring to the role out of your own experience ... my memories of what it was like to say the daily rosary and the Angelus and all those things which have a kind of practice that is not dissimilar to the kind of prayer and rituals within Islam."
After Love will play at the New Zealand International Film Festival, which is running between 28 October to 14 November in Auckland and 4-21 November in Wellington.
