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Hangin' With Archives
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Sarah BolgerTakes OnThe Spiderwick Chroniclesby Lynn B
We nabbed some face time with pretty Sarah in Beverly Hills recently and we’d kill for her cute Fornarina sparkly silver sweater! Gorgeous. She finished off her outfit with jeans and black patent leather flats. We wanted the scoop on her fencing moves in the film, what it’s like to work with one actor…playing twins and a bunch of fantasy creatures that weren’t really on set. Hey, what does this beauty look for in a guy (evidently Shia LaBeouf really rings her chimes!)? Also, what are her pet dating peeves and her fave toy as a kid? Let’s find out….. AGW: You have to put up with twin brothers in this film. You have a very good relationship with your sister [Emma] right? Sarah: Oh yeah. AGW: No fighting? Sarah: Never. No, I mean me and Emma, we have our usual arguments. Emma is four years younger than me and she has the same dress size and shoe size; a pain in the neck! AGW: You’re Irish. Did you find it hard to get the [American] accent for this film? You do Brit for “The Tudors”. Sarah: No. I work at accents very hard. I’ve been studying accents since In America because it’s gonna come up, accents and stuff like that. I think it was good and I was thrilled to be able to finally do an American accent in a movie. As soon as you get off the plane in back country, you must tend to do the accent. It’s when I come home and say like ‘cell phone’, they like throw things at me ‘it’s mobile!’ I come home and I say ‘sidewalk’ and they’re like ‘it’s path’. Girls in my class just want to kill me at this stage. AGW: How physical was this film compared to your work in Stormbreaker? Was there a lot more physical work in this one for you? Sarah: Yeah, definitely. Stormbreaker was great and there was some blue screen but not as much as this movie. This movie, I was [in front of] the blue screen like 24 hours a day. I think that the creatures and things like that were great fun. It was just so unusual to be kicking and slicing and punching things that were nowhere near. Just air. And then the twin thing…there was only one Freddie, there were no goblins and, when we drive up to the house and you see all the forest? Those leaves were added. It’s freaky. So crazy. The fencing was difficult. AGW: You had never done that before? Sarah: Never. I did like five weeks of intense training for it. Three hours straight with the Olympic Canadian fencing coach. AGW: Is that something you’ve kept doing? Sarah: I’ve kept it up at home. Absolutely. Most weekends, when I’m there, I meet up with the guy who taught me for this movie. AGW: When you and Freddie were hanging out off camera, was Freddie just young enough to be a pain or did he seem more like a contemporary?
AGW: Can you talk about the green screen work? There are tons of fantasy creatures in the film to be added later in computer that you have to pretend are there with you. Sarah: This is why this movie took so long to do. It is only an hour and thirty minutes. We did a reference shot to explain to us, first of all, where the creatures would be. We’d have cardboard cutouts. Phil Tippet did a fantastic job. Phil with this pole and a cutout Hogsqueal running along with it. That would explain that to us. Then Mark [Waters the director] would run through which direction to look but, literally, we had to do it so many times because we had to give them some kind of room to make changes in characters. If we only looked a certain direction, that meant they only had that certain amount of space to create the character which is not fair for them. So, there were like eighteen takes and only about seven, maybe five were the ones you could actually use on film. So it took a while. AGW: You were about ten or eleven when the first book in this series came out. Did you read the books? Sarah: I did. I read them. You know what’s funny? I went to Paramount for a reading after In America and they gave me the books as a present. That was cool, right? They were [predicting] something. Then I read them and I thought they were fantastic and I really enjoyed them. Actually, then we couldn’t read the last one which came out two years ago. I was convinced I looked like [her character] Mallory. AGW: What did you all do in Montreal? You can’t party at the clubs yet. Sarah: I do not drink. I’m very good, no Guinness for me. AGW: Did you go do anything with Freddie or anyone else? Sarah: When we were there, at the end of our shoot, Casino Royale came out. I think we went to see that like four times [laugh]. Seems like we did because we were working most days and it was long hours because you have to fit in three hours of school work every day. Then the weekends come and you just kind of want to sit there. We had a beautiful hotel room, myself and my mum the whole time, like five months, a long time but the only advantage is you don’t have to clean up. AGW: Your director was saying that you didn’t know how to say something sarcastically at the beginning. You didn’t know what that was? Sarah: I’m not a sarcastic person really. I learned it after. Mark was so funny. He used to go ‘Sarah, you need to watch Mean Girls! AGW: Nick Nolte was saying that Mark gave him some strange directions like ‘pretend you’re a junkie coming out of the alley’. Did you get any weird direction from Mark? Sarah: Mark has this direct image in his head and it’s funny how he explains it. I’m sure the image is quite clear yet he explains it in this odd way. He used to refer to Mean Girls [which he directed] a lot for me. He’s used to working with teenaged girls. I remember this one scene, I was running down these stairs and he’s like ‘pretend your legs are falling off. You run that fast’. Just things like that. He’s a funny guy. AGW: He said he had this loud speaker and he’d do the voice of the monster ogre Mulgarath? Sarah: That was hilarious. You have no idea. The book burning scene was the best. We were sitting there and they were burning the book and he was like [chanting loudly] ‘Book! Book!’ He’s fantastic. If cameras had filmed that, it would be a best-seller comedic film. AGW: Was it hard to keep a straight face? Sarah: [laughs] Yes. AGW: Which half of Freddie did you prefer working with? Which twin? Sarah: [laughs] Simon. He’s just so much nicer than the angry, troublesome Jared. AGW: Is Freddie more like Simon really? Sarah: He’s somewhere in the middle. I don’t think he’s quite as shy and quiet as Simon was. Freddie’s a lot of fun. AGW: ‘The Tudors’ is a different kind of project. Can you talk about your character Princess Mary? Sarah: Absolutely, ‘The Tudors’ is completely different from, I think, anything really that I’ve done before. Princess Mary is a dark character who has been suppressed her whole life and she’s so devoted to the Catholic religion and feels that that’s her only escape. It’s the only thing that’s looking after her because she’s forbidden from seeing her mother and her dad doesn’t want to see her because he’s gone off with Anne Boleyn and I think it’s such a different role from this like feisty, bubbly Mallory. Actually, the sword fight would probably come in handy with Mary. I’m so sure she’s going to kill someone at some stage. AGW: Well, she did become “Bloody Mary”. Sarah: She is indeed. She killed so many Protestants. AGW: The first season made a huge impact. Do you think people are going to be satisfied with Season Two? Sarah: I really hope so. I think the script is very strong and, like ‘Spiderwick’, we have the books to go off and in this, we have history to go off of. I do so much research. You’ve no idea. I like history anyway. I just think it’s appropriate to do that. It’s like with school work, if I put a lot of effort in, I feel so much better when I get the end result. It’s like acting; if I put a lot of work in and do the research and I do the work that’s necessary… like for ‘Spiderwick’ it was fencing and the accent work. I think it paid off in the end. AGW: What kind of music are you into? Sarah: I love that question. I have an odd taste in music. My favorite band would be like Simon and Garfunkle and I like Linkin Park, they’re great. Red Hot Chili Peppers and I really like Carrie Underwood, completely different and Queen. Queen’s fantastic. I went to see Queen at the ballet (huh?) and that was the best thing I’ve ever seen in my whole, entire life including ‘Spiderwick’ but ‘Spiderwick’s’ the best. AGW: Movies? Sarah: My favorite movie is The Fugitive and second favorite is Moulin Rouge. AGW: No reason why you would but have you met Saoirse [Ronan]? You know, fellow countrywoman and all. We interviewed her too. Sarah: No. She’s the girl in Atonement? No, I have not met her. AGW: If we’re going Irish, Colin Farrell is two floors down doing interviews. Sarah: I heard that. I’ve actually met Colin. He’s a great guy! AGW: Are you surprised at how far you’ve come? It’s only a few years since you were a kid starting out in In America. Sarah: It seems like a long time tough, doesn’t it? It is crazy though how time passes. I didn’t know how In America was going to turn out. I didn’t know how successful it was going to be. I don’t do movies expecting to get my next. I live for the moment and I think that’s it’s silly to kind of be constantly ‘oh, what’s my next? What’s my next?’ You don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m sure going to finish my education. I don’t know, maybe do Astronomy, something cool like that but film sets are my favorite place to be. They’re my second home. AGW: Favorite things to do on a date? Sarah: First of all, it has to be Shia LaBeouf! [we all laugh]. AGW: We’ve interviewed him several times too. We’ll have to tell him you like him! Sarah: [is she blushing??] What else? I hate when guys look at themselves in the mirror or like when you’re passing a shop window. It drives me up the wall. I have some friends that are guys and they always do that and I’m like ‘oh, get over yourself. Come on’. They spend more time looking in the mirror than I do. I like jokes and I like light-hearted stuff and I don’t like guys who are real dull or only interested in football. AGW: Makes sense to me! What do you enjoy most about acting? Sarah: I love reading scripts and I love understanding a character and getting into that character. I’m not a method actress in any sense but I enjoy ‘being’ that character and working at it and I do a lot of research on the character. I think that being on set and trying out different ways to say stuff and experimenting and working with some fantastic people. I’ve been very lucky. There’s nothing bad about it. AGW: Is there a favorite historical character you would love to play? Sarah: Keira Knightley took my role! If they had waited a few years, I still could have been Elizabeth Bennet [in Pride and Prejudice] you know? AGW: Favorite toy when you were a kid? Sarah: You never know. Mallory might be a toy [action figure?]. That would be pretty cool. You know ‘Sesame Street’? Elmo? Him. Tickle me Elmo, the red one. Those things crack me up. I had one in my closet. In the middle of the night [laughing] ‘hee, hee, hee, hee’. Creepiest thing ever! Pictures courtesy of and copyright Paramount Pictures, 2008 |
 
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17
on Feb 28th, pretty, blue-eyed actress Sarah Bolger has accomplished a
lot since she was born in Dublin, Ireland. She’s now co-starring
as a teen sis to twins both played by Freddie Highmore in the fantasy
adventure film The Spiderwick Chronicles based upon the popular
novels. Sarah and younger sister Emma made a big impression as immigrant
siblings in the touching film In America back in 2001. She has done a
lot of TV overseas and you might have seen her as femme fatale Sabina
Pleasure in the teen spy film Stormbreaker. She’s also
a young Princess Mary in the steamy historical TV soap “The Tudors”
co-starring with hot Jonathan Rhys-Meyers. 
Sarah:
He’s only a year, maybe less, younger than me and we did [hang out].
We had a brother and sister relationship. It was like four, almost five
months of filming. Every day, we were pretty much on set together. I think
we both annoyed each other by the end of it but we had great fun. Especially
in the griffin sequence. We took a break for a while, then we went to
L.A. to finish up it all. And it was so much fun to get back into it.
You miss filming and you miss the group of people that you become a short-term
family with.