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Dec 06 2014 Here’s an article from the Sydney Morning Herald published last month for the Australian release of “A Long Way Down”. Toni Collette has never been afraid to transform herself for a role – she was launched onto the world stage, after all, as a chunky version of herself in Muriel’s Wedding – but as Maureen in A Long Way Down, which screens as part of the British Film Festival now touring the country, she seems almost to have shrunk inside her frumpy cardigan. The film was launched at the Berlin Film Festival, which is where we speak. The day after it debuts Collette is back up on the screen again in another film, the small American independent Lucky Them, playing a hipster rock journalist. In real life, she thrives on living out of a suitcase and is a big believer in embracing change. “If you try to put the brake on,” she says, “it’s all going to go to shit.” A somewhat less bumpy version of this message pervades A Long Way Down, which is adapted from Nick Hornby’s novel about four very disparate people who meet on a London rooftop one New Year’s Eve. They have all come to commit suicide. Each has his or her reason, but Maureen’s is the most poignant: she has a severely disabled son who would get much better care, she believes, if she were not there to look after him. Maureen is also isolated, friendless, overworked and terribly tired, a situation that starts to ease a little when the four would-be suicides form an unlikely gang. The full article can be read here. Read posts from the archive:
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