“A production designer once told me, ‘never do a movie in a submarine or in space,'” Anna Kendrick recalls. She defied that warning, however, to make Stowaway, the galactic sci-fi thriller from director Joe Penna (Arctic) headed to Netflix on April 22. “It was so simple and so lean, but totally compelling,” Kendrick tells EW of her initial reaction to Penna and Ryan Morrison’s taut script, which inspired her to enter the cosmos despite that well-intentioned warning. The actress stars as Zoe, a medical researcher on a spaceship headed to Mars on a two-year mission. On board with her are the ship’s commander (Toni Collette) and a biologist (Daniel Dae Kim) — and an unexpected stowaway (Shamier Anderson), whom the crew find trapped inside the ship shortly into their mission. With the small craft outfitted only to support three passengers and some irreparable damage done to its life support systems, the crew faces an impossible problem, which only Zoe believes they can solve. “I had never really read anything like it,” adds Collette. “It is contained and the characters are confined but the questions posed, moral and otherwise, are vast and wide open.” While the concept of being trapped in a tiny space may resonate after a year in quarantine, “it’s ultimately about community, survival, and sacrifice,” Collette points out. “Who can’t relate to that at the moment?” For Kendrick, “the thing that feels really relevant is less the isolation of it and more that kind of problem-solving part of your brain that we were all engaging so vigorously in the first couple months of the pandemic,” she says. “Just that constant problem-solving of, ‘wait, okay, how do we fix this?’ And just when it seems like you’re onto something, there’s some very obvious fundamental problem.” The complete interview with Anna Kendrick and Toni Collette can be read over at Entertainment Weekly.
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