Orphan star’s return to creepy role proved challenging

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This article was published 19/08/2022 (1456 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If you haven’t seen the 2009 film Orphan, you may not be aware of the plot twist that drives the story of an apparently psychotic child who threatens the lives of her adoptive family.

Hence, this spoiler alert: Little Esther is really an adult woman suffering from a medical condition that keeps her in the body of a child.

That past is prologue in the sequel, actually a prequel, Orphan: First Kill, which was filmed in and around Winnipeg in late 2020. We see how Esther violently escapes from an Estonian psychiatric facility and manages to pass herself off as the long-lost daughter of American artist Allen Albright (Rossif Sutherland) and his wife Tricia (Julia Stiles).

It’s a twisted tale, enhanced by a twisted bit of casting. Esther is once again played by Isabelle Fuhrman, who really was a child of 10 when she first took on the role. For First Kill, she returns to the role as a grown woman, playing the role of a grown woman in the body of a child.

Got that?

Fuhrman, now 26, cheerfully acknowledges it was a challenge to return to the role, not just for her but for director William Brent Bell and the entire crew of the film, who had to work to make Fuhrman look like a kid without the aid of CGI, instead relying on old-school movie magic.

“I feel so proud of the performance that I did and so proud of the entire team,” Fuhrman says during a Zoom interview with the Free Press from Los Angeles. “A huge amount of people had to work extra hard to do the forced perspective with the camera angles, light each scene differently, making sure I had larger forks, place settings, beds… The wardrobe fitting me like a child.

“It really took a village to make me look like a kid again,” Fuhrman says. “And I’m so grateful that we ended up with a really fun, entertaining movie.”

It wasn’t especially fun getting the movie made in late 2020, when the usual challenges of a winter shoot combined with the extraordinary challenges of a COVID-19 lockdown that threatened to close down the entire movie. (This was well before vaccines were available, when isolation and relentless on-set COVID testing were the rules of the day.)

Yet in a perverse way, that circumstance may have enhanced Fuhrman’s work in the film.

‘It was definitely an interesting experience doing two weeks of quarantine in Winnipeg, and then immediately diving in among all these people,” Fuhrman says. “Every day I went on set, I was so happy to be around people who were so kind and wonderful.

“We created this wonderful family, but we couldn’t see each other outside of work, and that was kind of isolating.

“It kind of helped me with my character, with Esther, because she’s surrounded by a ton of people and yet feels completely isolated and alone. And that’s how I felt sometimes. I’d be going to work during the day and be surrounded by people, and then go back to my little house that I was staying in.

“I would sit there by myself. And I would feel really lonely,” she says. “It added to the loneliness Esther felt surrounded by the family that she finds herself with.”

Of course, the biggest challenge remained playing a credible child while an adult — a relatively easy task when she was 10, but not so easy in her mid-20s.

“It’s never been done in cinema history,” Fuhrman says. “And with that came the terrifying fear of: would I actually be able to do it?

“The best thing I did was to give up the expectation that I was going be able to do exactly what I did when I was 10 years old,” Fuhrman says. “I had to discover something new, while also paying homage to what I had created before.

“In that, I got so much closer than I thought I would to when I was 10.”

Coming to the role as a real adult, “I think I was able to view her from a more intellectual place with more life experience,” she says.

But she stands by the perception she had when she was still a child.

“I actually think the emotions and the understanding I had of her when I was a kid was really the most important, which was really that she just wants to be loved,” Fuhrman says. “I think that’s what booked me the role initially… that I understood her primal desire and wants, rather than all the other stuff that she was doing around her.

“It’s not like it was willy-nilly going after these people, killing them,” she says. “She’s a survivor. She’s a fighter. And she knows what she wants, and she’ll stop at nothing to get it.”

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Twitter: @FreepKing