Here comes a nice interview with Rotten Tomatoes ahead of the US release of “Dream Horse”. For a certain kind of movie lover – read: this writer – nothing could be a more enticing lure back to theaters than the promise of Toni Collette tearing into a meaty underdog role on the biggest screen possible. This week, that certain kind of moviegoer is in for a treat. In Dream Horse, the feel-good Welsh film that critics say has arrived in theaters – after delays due to COVID-19 – at just the right time for a country in need of some serious uplift, Collette plays real-life small-town hero Jan Vokes, a working-class woman who wakes up one day with a singular ambition: to breed a champion race horse. The film, whose story was told in the 2015 Certified Fresh documentary Dark Horse, follows Vokes as she rallies a disparate group of locals – among them Damian Lewis’s initially skeptical local accountant, Howard Davies – to put some money together and make that dream come true. For Collette, who recently wrapped on Guillermo del Toro’s upcoming Nightmare Alley and is currently shooting Netflix drama Pieces of Her in Sydney, Australia, it’s another critically acclaimed performance as a woman whose circumstances are humble but who should not be underestimated, a trait she says she’s been attracted to from the time of her breakout film role as Mariel/Muriel Heslop in Australian comedy classic, Muriel’s Wedding. In Vokes, Collette says she found someone to whom she could relate: “I am a sucker for an underdog story,” Collette says. “Feeling out of place, but having a certain amount of faith in oneself, just having this gut feeling of, ‘I have to pursue this. There’s no real clear reason why, except that I’m backing myself here and I feel it and I have to do it.’” Ahead of the movie’s release, Collette spoke with Rotten Tomatoes about the pressure to get one of Wales’ most beloved (true) fairy tales just right, forming a tight bond with her cast and a horse named Bo, and why she can’t wait to see what the “singular” Del Toro has done with the highly anticipated Nightmare Alley. The complete interview can be read over at Rotten Tomatoes.
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May 20th, 2022
December 3rd, 2018
February 23rd, 2017
