British actress Patricia Allison spoke with Bossip about her role as Ella Patchet in Paradise.
Source: Courtesy / Tubi
From filmmaker Max Isaacson, who’s best known for his work in genre filmmaking and his time with Funny or Die, PARADISE is a tropical western about a girl seeking to find who murdered her father in her small island town. Allison’s character, Ella Patchet is a young punk who imagines herself a modern-day gunslinger. With more bullets in her six-shooter than friends in her life, her only anchor is her father, the local sheriff of their backwater paradise. But when he is brutally murdered, Ella’s fragile world collapses. As the town reels from the loss, the mayor brings in outside law enforcement to handle the investigation, where all leads point to the return of a ruthless drug runner from her father’s past. Despite her doubts, and fueled by grief and rage, Ella sets out on a path of vengeance.
Check out the trailer below:
“I got an e-mail from my agents saying, ‘We’ve got this script in,’ and I read it and I was like, ‘This is enticing… Who is this Ella Patchet character and why is she wanting to kill everybody?’” I was curious about that and curious about where I was as well and how I wanted to play her as well. I think I was also just young enough that I could get away with playing quite a young girl who is coming into her own and having to make quite interesting and tough decisions without her mother there, who she lost, and her brother who she lost, and so she’s in all this pain and she doesn’t really know how to deal with it. I think we also catch her in the time where she’s finding it hard to speak to her father as a young woman. She’s doesn’t have the words necessarily but there is a camaraderie there but she’s lacking in something. I found that really interesting.”
Source: Courtesy / Tubi
“I enjoyed how unafraid she was,” Allison added. ” I would say that she’s quite fearless, which gets her into trouble which she probably quite likes and that was interesting, playing a character who likes getting in trouble and likes being in a confrontational situation, because I would say I myself I’m not one who likes being in a confrontational situation, so that was fun… getting over the fear of being in like a fight or whatever. I really enjoyed that she stands up for herself, she stands up for what she believes in and and I think those are all really good values. Also just in terms of herself and in the love that she has for her friends and that her family and the people that she has around her and how she shows that, I quite enjoy it as well, even though she can be quite angry. She gives Townes [Myles Evans character] a gun. She put the gun together because she’s a genius and can dismantle and put things together. It’s sweet, there’s a way of showing love there that is that is really lovely. I was drawn to her subtleties I would say rather than maybe the rage and everything else I was actually drawn to trying to bring out more her vulnerability within the rage, trying to bring out the sadness and the realness of of like what it’s like to lose a parent and a brother.”
Source: Courtesy / Tubi
As you can see from the trailer, Ella is a baddie with a whole bunch of bullets, but Patricia is a Brit with no prior experience even firing a weapon, so we asked her to dive deep into the training it took for her to take on her trigger-happy role.
“The fighting stuff was not new to me,” Allison told BOSSIP. “I had done some stage combat before… I like playing around with my body and every time I’m on stage I try and throw myself around as much as possible so all of that kind of physical stuff was fun and felt like I was sort of revisiting something that I had already known, so in terms of like working well and working quickly I was able to sort of do that. The gun stuff though, I couldn’t even pick it up, it was so heavy. I was not used to seeing it.”
“We were working with fake guns as well in the beginning on set. Even so, there are so many rules. So even before I got on set I was doing a lot of educating myself on what weapon I’m using, what weapons she’s used to using, because there’s non automatic weapons which was really nice that we were also focusing on that kind, like the mechanics of it. She takes things apart puts them, puts them together again and and has this idea of how to build and create this machine. So she really understands it and loves it, like you would building a car. Every part is specific and honored and so I had to get into that mindset as well, and trying to fall in love with it. I had to do a lot of training. I had to do a lot of hand exercises. Then when I got to the gun range just understanding… There was a lot of chat before the weapon even came out. The guy was like — ‘If there’s an explosion in your hand… It can backfire…’ They were like, ‘It’s going to be fine, it’s going to be fun.’ I was like, ‘Will it be fine?’
“The experience of it is quite outstanding, shooting a gun and something my character does all the time, she kills loads of people, but that thing of shooting this thing and hearing it tear through the land and you know it’s powerful and it’s terrifying, and I was like, ‘God I can’t imagine what it’s like to live in America,’ with all of this. It was a lot of respect, also for me I find it quite empowering to learn how to dismantle the gun, to put the bullets in it, to feel safe holding this thing. That was another thing. I was like, ‘Look I don’t wanna accidentally shoot somebody.’
Source: Courtesy / Tubi
In addition to acknowledging the culture shock she experienced as a Brit, Allison also spoke about how the tragedy on the set of Rust affected her and the crew, who were shooting at the time.
“I’m in America and I’m a Brit,” Allison told BOSSIP. “I didn’t realize there is a lot of PTSD that comes with gunfire. There are a few members of crew who also found it really difficult at times, the exposure to the machinery but I think we all dealt with it really nicely and safely and we were constantly like, ‘This is what we’re doing and this is a fake…’ That was great just to check in every single time. I can’t tell you how important being rigorous with this kind of stuff is.”
“There was a horrible accident that happened when we were shooting and that was terrifying on set,” Allison shared about learning of the Rust tragedy. “A lot of people did not enjoy reading that news while we were shooting. I think everybody in the industry sort of felt it. It was just such a sad, sad time, so also that affected us and it made it extremely more serious and just also made the work that we were doing more important because the message of it at the end is that she does put the gun down. She does explore all this violence and this mayhem and chaos and rage but she loses her friend, she’s already lost her entire family. What else is this gun gonna do for you? Other than more destruction and more pain? So that was another reason why I was like, ‘I can play this, I can do this.’ She’s not like, ‘Yay guns!’ at the end. This is not the way and so in in a way I hope it can hold as a sort of a metaphor and stand for something.”
Paradise is currently streaming on Tubi in the US and Canada
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