Jonathan Sim
Carolina Caroline combines many of the genres you love. A young woman joins a charming con man on the run, leaving a trail of crime and passion as they hustle through the Southeast in search of her estranged mother. It is a road movie, a love story, and a crime thriller all at once, and judging by recent conversations with its stars and director, the chemistry on screen was no accident, and the performances behind it were built from something deeply personal.
Samara Weaving and Kyle Gallner play the film’s central pair, and for both of them, Carolina Caroline represented territory they had never navigated before. Weaving, widely known for her work in horror, including Ready or Not, The Babysitter, and Scream VI, put it plainly: “I hadn’t done a love story or a drama, really, especially not as the lead. So I was really excited to be a part of this.”
Gallner, himself no stranger to the genre after Smile and his own Scream appearance, echoed the sentiment without hesitation. “Same thing, honestly. I’d never gotten to do anything like this before.”
The film’s premise — a pair of grifters burning through the South — apparently had a way of blurring the line between character and actor. When asked whether either of them had ever stolen anything from a set, the conversation took a cheerfully confessional turn. It was Gallner who copped to the ashtray. “I stole Sam a really big ashtray from this really nice hotel.”
Weaving, meanwhile, claimed a prize of her own — a pair of boots lifted during the making of the 2021 action film Snake Eyes. “They got me these amazing Gucci boots, and I went, ‘Oh, can I wear them in?’ because they were stiff, so I’d bring them home every day.” She offered a sporting concession to anyone listening: “If you’re listening and you want them back, I can give them to you, but they’re really nice, so thanks.”
One key scene involves Oliver (Gallner) teaching Caroline (Weaving) how to pickpocket, a moment that doubles as an early showcase of their chemistry. Neither actor, it turns out, has much natural talent for the craft. “Terrible. Really bad,” Weaving said of her own abilities.
Gallner was more philosophical about his own unknowing: “I don’t think I’ve ever actually tried it, so I don’t really know.” Weaving was more charitable about his prospects: “I reckon Kyle would be good if he practiced.” Gallner, to his credit, accepted the compliment. “I’ll go with that.”
As for how that chemistry came to exist in the first place, the actors credited a mix of luck, craft, and the instincts of their director, Adam Carter Rehmeier. “I think it’s luck, isn’t it?” Weaving offered. Gallner expanded on the thought: “I think it’s a combination of things. Adam is really good at understanding that type of thing. Me and Sam just really get along, and we work very similarly. It just worked.”
The film’s most quietly devastating sequence belongs to Kyra Sedgwick, who plays Caroline’s estranged mother. It is a single, extended scene — roughly twelve minutes — and it carries the emotional weight of the entire film on its back. Sedgwick described building the character from the inside out, constructing a private history from the few details the script provided. “You make visceral memories for yourself, especially for that scene, because she talks about those memories — ‘they would always tell me what to do, tell me what to be.’ So you build some of those pivotal memories that make up the character. Then you build a backstory about when she left, what she’s been doing ever since, what the morning has been like, and then you just fly.”
The backstory Sedgwick constructed is rich and unsparing. “She felt like she was trapped in this small town, felt like she had to get married — didn’t really want to. She got pregnant first and then had to get married. She liked the guy she was with, but he was boring and too nice. She had a wild streak, then had her baby and felt very hemmed in — probably had some postpartum — and everyone wanted her to be more of a ‘girl,’ wear dresses, be less wild. She liked to party, and finally she just couldn’t deal with it anymore. The crying baby, the breastfeeding, everything — and she split.”
Rehmeier, listening nearby, nodded along and confirmed that his directorial approach to the scene was built around protecting that interior work. “I remember we had a conversation early on that we wouldn’t flow-break her — that we’d let her do the whole thing almost like a one-act play. When I first read that scene in the script, it was always my favorite, and I thought, ‘Okay, this whole film sort of hinges on this, and on Caroline’s reaction to meeting her mom.’ So I wanted to make sure that at least for Kyra, she was comfortable and we weren’t going to interrupt anything.” The result was a day of sustained, unbroken performance — nine takes of the full scene on Sedgwick, then nine more on Weaving after they flipped the camera.
For Sedgwick, the role represented something she rarely gets asked to do. “People are often lazy and don’t do their homework — they go, ‘Oh, she’s The Closer,’ or ‘She was in Born on the Fourth of July,’ and cast her as the sweet mom. It takes somebody who does their research to see past that.” What Rehmeier offered her instead was something far less comfortable and far more alive. “I’m just grateful to get to play a monster — and she is kind of a monster — but also someone who is a hope-to-die alcoholic. I think it takes imagination and understanding that actors can actually transform. She was equally generous about the film surrounding her single scene: “It’s this one-act play in the middle of a really well-written movie.”
Her admiration for Rehmeier as a filmmaker is plainspoken and considerable. “I knew Adam was going to kill it. I think he’s one of our very best. I was blown away by Dinner in America — I saw it during the pandemic, my son told me about it, then I watched Snack Shack. He makes such bold, different visual choices.”
Rehmeier received the praise with characteristic deflection toward the work itself. He cited the directors of the late 1970s and early ’80s as the model he aspires to — filmmakers who moved fluidly between genres and tones without planting a flag in any one of them. “I really don’t want to work in just one space — I’d like to work in all of them, because I love a lot of types of movies. Nothing’s off the table for me.” His process, he explained, begins with a single prerequisite: “First, I have to really love something on the page before I can move forward. But once that’s there, it’s all design — and I just want to do as many different shades as possible throughout my career.”
Carolina Caroline, by all accounts, is exactly that kind of shade — something new, something felt, and something that nobody involved had quite done before.
Comments
Loading…