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Mar 25

2022

Vanity Fair: In The Staircase, Colin Firth and Toni Collette Find Life in Death

As part of their Awards Insider’s exclusive spring TV coverage series, Vanity Fair features a lenghty article, including interviews with Toni Collette and Colin Firth, on the upcoming HBO Max series “The Staircase”:It was four or five in the morning, the set had reverted to its bloody basics, and Toni Collette was tasked to die—again. She’d already acted out several ways that her character, Kathleen Peterson, could have met her grisly demise, but returning to the scene of the crime (or accident) for another freshly devised scenario struck her anew. “It just became so surreal,” she recalls. “This woman died. We don’t know how she died, but there’s a big responsibility that comes with bringing a truthful quality not only to that experience, but to her life.”

Collette found much of the job here to be like “choreography,” balancing raw emotion with technical precision on where to fall or yell or simply stand. It took a kind of toll. “You’ve just got to shake it off at the end of the day,” she says now. Listening to her, it’s clear the mission behind the role mattered a great deal to her. “Kathleen’s death is so gruesome and incomprehensible,” Collette tells me. “I just want her to be seen for all she was, as a person, prior to when she left her body. She had spunk and spirit, and she really lived and loved.” In The Staircase, death is only where one’s story begins.

The complete interview can be read over at Vanity Fair.

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