Physically, Claflin said he “had to be still and use muscles I wasn’t used to using in order to manipulate my body into a certain position and sustain that for hours and hours on end”. But he said the character’s “emotional journey” was even more daunting. “We look for it in yoga, or ‘If I hold this crystal, it’s going to make me feel better.’ We do that even in this modern day and age, where Netflix and chill is the only choice”.
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“This is not a decision that we’re saying is the right decision necessarily, but it’s his decision and it’s kind of true to the character that he is”.
Sam Claflin: “Yeah, I think so”.
“Oh, my God”, she said. To be sure, I’m not disparaging anyone’s beliefs and pretty much can understand where the protest is coming from, but this is the wrong target.
While Clarke is the reason to see Thea Sharrock’s film, she’s not the only good thing in it. Oh, I dare. And this isn’t as dad bod as it gets. Because emotionally manipulative and melodramatic as it is, Me Before You (**½ out of four; rated PG-13; in theaters nationwide Friday) doesn’t strike as concrete a bond as it should between a gruff yet hunky quadriplegic Will (Sam Claflin) and his quirky and loving caregiver Lou (Emilia Clarke). Embarking together on a series of adventures, both Lou and Will get more than they bargained for, and find their lives-and hearts-changing in ways neither one could have imagined. Lou is hired mainly to be his friend, though she has her work cut out for her since he’s mentally prepared for an assisted suicide and tends to be cruel to anyone in range of his caustic wit. What’s somewhat unique about Jojo Moyes’s weepie, which the writer scripted from her 2012 bestseller, are the provocative dilemmas it explores to coax those tears.
“I just.want to be a man who has been to a concert with a girl in a red dress”. She also played Sara Connor in Terminator Genisys – the ret con version where Arnold Schwarzenegger as the T800 kept saying “old, but not obsolete”.
As she was deciding what to keep and what to cut, she and Sharrock focused on Will and Lou’s romance.
Author Jojo Moyes wrote the screenplay to fit the most of her book into a two hour film. After the book’s initial publication in Britain, its movie rights were snatched up nearly immediately.
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Clarke, who’s nearly unrecognizable here, is a large part of what makes the film as engaging as it is; seeing her as the sartorially adventurous Lou, wearing spotted pumps, a fuzzy orange sweater and a wide grin, is startling and weirdly mesmerizing.
