回复：【S.H.→☆杂志】Little White Lies Issue 73 水形专题

Longtime champion Mike Leigh was among the earliest to recognise this talent. Of Hawkins he said in a 2008 interview with The Telegraph: “She’s extremely witty and sharp, but she also has these great reserves of emotion.” Leigh previously cast her as a troubled teenager in 2002’s All or Nothing, and a well-to-do rape victim in 2004’s Vera Drake. While competent in these early small roles, it was her third collaboration with Leigh which made a film star of her, and in Happy-Go-Lucky, she finally got a chance to play a character not mired in some form of emotional torment.
In the context of Leigh’s London, Hawkins’ irrepressible primary school teacher Poppy is an outsider – too keen and pure of heart for the cruelty of a city that sees her bike stolen not ten minutes into the film. She then discovers that her driving instructor, Scott (played with aplomb by Eddie Marsan) is a charmless, xenophobic misogynist, and possibly insane. In the face of these knockbacks, Poppy remains determined to carve a path on her own terms. Her unrelenting optimism and frivolity is met with suspicion by many characters, from a jaded shop assistant to a roving transient and the odious and irritable Scott.
It’s a difficult task to play such an upbeat character without the performance descending into one-note irritation, but Poppy is not impervious to melancholy, glimpsed when she attempts to help a young pupil struggling at home, and in dealing with Scott. When he delivers a racially-charged rant during a driving lesson, Poppy calmly turns to him and asks, “Were you bullied at school, Scott?” Her empathy and optimism are the armour she wears to protect her from an unkind world.

【“She allows herself to be vulnerable and even unglamorous in these roles – there’s a sense that she takes every shot in every film to heart.”】
Famously shy and reluctant to partake in interviews and press tours, she rejects the notion that an actor has to perform off-screen. Following Happy- Go-Lucky, it was a long five year wait before she garnered praise (and an Oscar nomination) for her role in Blue Jasmine, which marked a grand departure from the British dramas in which she’d made her name. Playing opposite Cate Blanchett, her Ginger was the Stella to Blanchett’s Blanche DuBois. She held her own against the luminous Blanchett, centred as the film’s glamorous heart. Woody Allen’s script occasionally encourages titters at Ginger’s lack of refinement that sees her favour a hideous mustard-yellow Fendi bag and embark on an unwitting affair with Louis CK’s boorish sound engineer. It’s typical of Allen’s sneering New York cynicism – yet despite this, Hawkins brings her disarming vulnerability and wells of empathy to the role. As sisters only in name, Ginger dismisses herself in the context of Jasmine, saying repeatedly, “She got the good genes”, and responding only with self-lacerating apologies to her sister’s constant haranguing. It’s a an unglamorous role, and Hawkins once again becomes an audience stand-in. She is perhaps the film’s beating heart.

Despite finding success with Leigh and Allen, there have been misfires too. When she appeared in a 2010 Broadway revival of Mrs Warren’s Profession, the New York Times scathingly said “If she is the future of Britain, woe betide that once mighty nation”, and her role as Slasher in Matthew Vaughn’s Layer Cake is over-the-top even for a film about the travails of cockney geezers. There’s a distinct sense that the film industry has never been entirely sure what to do with her – after all, she is not a ‘movie star’ in the typical sense, dainty and angular with pale skin, rarely seen on red carpets or on the pages of glossy magazines. With leading lady roles few and far between for any actress over the age of thirty, she has fallen into a rut of playing maternal figures, notably Mrs. Brown in Paul King’s terminally delightful Paddington films. There’s an inherent warmth about Hawkins that enables her to thrive in these roles, in particular her ability to not only act but react to her co-stars – quite an achievement in Paddington, which required her to develop a cosy rapport with a CGI bear.
Similarly, in Morgan Matthews’ underrated 2014 film, X+Y, she plays Julie Ellis, a widowed mother attempting to come to terms with both her husband’s death and her son’s autism. As young Nathan retreats into himself, Julie desperately scrambles for a way to connect, and to help him understand the world around him. Protective and yet constantly kept at arm’s length, there’s an aching loneliness about Julie, conveyed through Hawkins’ expressive eyes, and the way she finds her own sense of identity as her son finds his. She allows herself to be vulnerable and even unglamorous in these roles – there’s a sense that she takes every shot in every film to heart, and feels exactly what her character is feeling, rather than simply emulating it on cue.

In The Shape of Water, Hawkins once more plays an outsider in the form of Elisa Esposito. Her character’s muteness affords her the opportunity to demonstrate her remarkable talent for conveying an incredible range of emotions through movement and expression. Watching her, there’s a distinct impression that only she could have played the part, and throughout the film you see the Hawkins of yore – her sexually liberated Sue Trinder, her whimsical Poppy Cross, and even her plucky Mrs Brown. Hawkins carries these roles with her and she evolves in front of our eyes. “Of course, I would love to have that one iconic lead role,” she admitted in a 2011 interview with Ramascreen. “You do wanna find the role that defines you or that you can be really passionate about.” With her remarkable performance as Elisa, Hawkins has finally got her wish.
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图片第一部分是对整个电影的一个review。第二部分是toro的访谈。
把访谈里有关sally的部分文字版放一下。
Was there a particular film of Sally’s that made you think to cast her? I, personally, am a fan of Happy-Go-Lucky.
Yes, that was key. The three key movies for me were… Actually, the first one is not a movie. I saw the series Fingersmith, the BBC series, which is remarkable. She falls in love with a woman and they have beautiful loving sex, and I thought, I love the way she did it. There was no titilation. There was no sparkle in the eye. It’s just that she likes to have sex with a woman, and that’s the way it is. It’s a piece of character, it’s not the point. I love that. And I love the way she handled it. I didn’t want to do a beastiality movie that was perversion and schoolyard gossipy salivation. They just love each other. It doesn’t matter that he’s an amphibian man or any iteration of the other. The important thing is that they fall in love and they make love. Period. Then I saw her in Happy-Go-Lucky and I thought she can achieve this state of grace. She is blissful, but alive. Then I saw her in Richard Ayoade’s Submarine, where she’s a secondary character. The way I cast actors is not through the way he or she delivers lines, it’s the way he or she listens to the lines being spoken by others. Or by the way they look at the the other actor. I just thought, this is it. If I create a great creature and she looks at it like a man in a rubber suit, the film dies. If she looks at it like a creature, it lives. She had such a massive crush on the creature. For real. Sally, not the character.

所以导演对sally的casting主要受到fingersmith，happy-lucky-go和submarine的影响啊。。。