Rebecca De Mornay Spills on Working with 'Tough Cookie' Bella Thorne In New Film, Saint Clare (Exclusive)
Rebecca De Mornay is opening up about working with Bella Thorne in the new thriller Saint Clare, in which the Risky Business star plays an "aging actress."
De Mornay appears in the film as Gigi, an ex-actress and grandmother to Thorne's Clare Bleeker, a sociopathic killer seeking vengeance for the missing women in her neighborhood. For De Mornay, getting into character was both easy in some aspects but a challenge in other ways.
"I did not have to do a lot of research about what it's like to be an aging actress," De Mornay, 65, joked.
"It was just too funny to be offered a movie where I'm playing an eccentric, ex-movie star," she said, "I thought, 'OK, this I can do.'"
But the character of Gigi is more of a free-spirit, something De Mornay said is not the case for her.
"To have that kind of freedom," she continued, "I'm just more thoughtful and more anxious than that," she laughed.
"So that was sort of liberating to play," she then confessed.
Playing a maternal figure to Thorne's Clare, De Mornay said it was her job to instill in her on-screen granddaughter that "We don't take s--t. You don't have to take it. We do our own thing, we live independently."
"I had an immediate rapport with Bella. Sort of an unspoken thing," she said of working with the younger star. "There's a certain boldness, a certain defiance, a certain independence that we both have."
"She's a tough cookie, you know? As am I," De Mornay continued. "I think we both really like to have fun, also. As soon as I got there we were taking selfie polaroids of each other, together, and it was just effortless – the connection."
"But when we were shooting, she very much stayed in character of Clare with this suppressive secret and worries -- that she was carrying the whole film," she added.
In addition to working with Thorne in the film, the movie serves as a reunion between the actress and Frank Whaley.
The two starred on Outer Limits episode De Mornay also directed way back in 1995 -- with De Mornay recalling the encouragement Whaley gave her to become a director.
"I was happy about that because I cast him in that 30 years ago and here he is again! So that was also another good sign," she said of the actor appearing in the film, despite them not sharing any scenes together.
"I remember he said to me then, 'You've gotta direct again. You are really a director,'" she remembered from the '90s. "I was on that path, until I started throwing up and turned out I was pregnant with my first daughter,"
"And I written a script that I set up to direct and then I got it set up a second time and I started throwing up again and I was pregnant with my second daughter," she told TooFab. "And then the whole idea of directing collapsed for 20 years!"
While that one Outer Limits episode remains her one directing credit, De Mornay has continued to work steadily in both film and television.
Following her breakout role in Risky Business opposite Tom Cruise, she later starring in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, The Shining miniseries, Wedding Crashers, American Reunion and, most recently, played Dorothy Walker on Jessica Jones.
Saint Clare is available on demand now.
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