Julianne Moore and Sydney Sweeney Bring "Tense" Chemistry To Mother-Daughter Bond In Echo Valley
In Apple TV+’s Echo Valley, Julianne Moore plays Kate, a woman forced to confront how far she’ll go to protect her troubled daughter (Sydney Sweeney) when she shows up at her doorstep covered in someone else’s blood. At the red carpet premiere, Pop Culture Planet’s Kristen Maldonado caught up with the cast and creatives to discuss complex mother-daughter dynamics, intense fight sequences, and what makes a thriller actually work.
After the success of Mare of Easttown, creator Brad Ingelsby returned to his emotionally charged roots to write Echo Valley. “I love writing women, so it was a great chance to get back into writing these relationships that we explored a lot in Mare [of Easttown]. It was moms and daughters and friends,” he told me. “It was a challenge to figure out what to do next, but I was kicking the tires with Kevin [J. Walsh] and Mike [Pruss], our producers, and we brought in Michael [Pearce] and obviously we [were] incredibly lucky with the cast. I'm really proud of what we've done with this one.”
He gushed over how “lucky” he felt to have immense talents like Julianne Moore and Sydney Sweeney bring this mother-daughter story to life on screen. “As a writer, it's a dream. It's just incredible to put those words with those actors. Julianne, I've loved her forever. She's just one of the best of all time in my opinion. She's just so great in everything and Sydney really delivers a great performance here. To have actors of that caliber, it's what you dream of as a writer,” Ingelsby exclaimed. “At that point, your work is done. You put [it] in the hands of people that know what they're doing and they're going to bring something to the character that I'm not able to. They're going to elevate it in ways I couldn't dream, so I just feel really incredibly lucky.”
Director Michael Pearce agreed that casting Moore and Sweeney made his job easy. “A lot of my work was done for me when I cast the both of them because they're such good actors. They both, of course, admired each other's work so much. They were both really excited to work with each other, so you're starting from a really good place from your first rehearsal,” he shared. “We only did a couple of days rehearsal and pre-production. I'd spoken to both actors a lot leading up to that moment and then, when you're on set, I think we had a scene on its legs in five minutes. We'd block it out very quickly and then they’d jumped in the deep end. I really felt like my job was just modulating a tiny bit here and there ,so I felt almost alleviated from doing a lot of the hard work.”
One of the biggest scenes to shoot was a mother-daughter fight sequence. While Pearce was “nervous” for it, Moore loved every minute. “I was a bit, not worried, but I wanted it to be a big set piece in the movie and for it to be tense. We had to shoot it over a couple of days and there's a bit of blocking ‘cause they go into different rooms and they attack each other. My concern was could the actors sustain a level of intensity throughout those two days, but I found that they loved it. They couldn't wait to do that scene. They had so much energy and they were laughing between takes and then they would go at it again. I was nervous for them,” explained Pearce. “I mean, I thought Sydney was going to pierce an eardrum off Julianne. It got so much more extreme than I thought, but, for an actor, they were waiting for moments like that so it was a fun days work for them. Quite tense for us behind the camera because when you hear that level of ferocity your nervous system reacts to it, but, for them, it was the most fun day on set.”
“That's what you want as an actor. You want to explore the human condition. You want to be offered really interesting stories and characters. I'm spoiled for choice in these situations. I was so delighted to work with these incredibly talented people and this wonderful script, so I feel very fortunate,” said Moore about her recent roles in Echo Valley and Sirens, sharing that the fight scene was one of her favorites to film: “It was just fun to have a committed partner. It was fun to explore that relationship. It was exciting to go that big with it. It was really pleasurable actually.”
Domhnall Gleeson, who plays bad guy Jackie, shared his process for getting into the dark and gritty headspace required for Echo Valley. “If you're taking a character like Jackie home, things have gone terribly wrong. It involved a lot of prep,” he said. “I had like a few weeks on my own in a hotel room just to really get in there, so it's more the lead up to it is what's difficult. When it's over, it's a great relief and you enjoy throwing off the shackles.”
So what’s the secret behind crafting a solid thriller? “A part of it is trying to understand the genre itself. Audiences are so smart these days. Trying to understand what they expect to happen and then trying to subvert the expectations in a way that feels earned and doesn't betray the characters,” said Ingelsby. “It's really tough because audiences are so knowledgeable these days and you don't want to feel like you're trying to trick them, so you have to have a twist that feels really earned. It just takes a lot of time to think about it and hopefully you pull it off in a way where the audience doesn't feel like it's taking them out of the story. It still feels incredibly grounded in the world and the characters we're talking about.”
Pearce continued: “You got to invest in the characters. You got to create people that you identify with and you care about and they don't seem generic. There's a kind of specificity to them and Brad's so good at that. What I admired about Brad's script was it had the precision of a Swiss clock. You could never guess where it was going and everything seemed to make sense by the end, but he always had so many surprises up his sleeve. The blueprint has to be in the script. You can't direct your way out of a script that doesn't work with a thriller. You can't be. [It] doesn't matter how fancy you are with a camera. It needs to work on the page.”
While Echo Valley offers plenty of twists and suspense, Pearce hopes to torture audiences with more questions that will have you thinking about the film long after the final scene. “I never try to put a message in a film, but I see films as an experiential process that we go through. Part of it is just that that experience stays with you and that the relationship between Julianne's character and Sydney is murky and fuzzy. Hopefully that's a interesting question that you'll ruminate on after the film. Is Julianne's character heroic or is she the victim of abuse from her daughter? I don't know if I even know the answer to that question yet,” he mused. “I love it when movies torture you with a question you can't easily resolve. They stay with you and you're like, ‘I don't know the answer to that.’”
Echo Valley is streaming on Apple TV+.
