Stephanie Leonidas
Issue #25
The emerging actress talks about her breakthrough role in MirrorMask
By Rebecca Flint-Marx
Published: September 1st, 2005 | 2:07pm
Stephanie Leonidas stars in MirrorMask, one of the most visually inventive films in recent history. But while Leonidas was making the otherwordly, darkly surreal epic, she may as well have been in an Ohio suburb. “There was a lot of blue screen,” the British actress says. “It was a bit strange. We all said we’d have to go into therapy from talking to [marks] on the wall the whole time.”
The threat of insanity seems to have paid off. The film, a collaboration between the graphic novelist Neil Gaiman and the Jim Henson Company, places Leonidas front and center as Helena, a 15-year-old who suffers the irony of wanting to run away from the circus. More specifically, her parents’ circus. One night, she wishes her mother (Gina McKee) dead, after which her mother falls dangerously ill. Tormented with guilt, Helena is transported into a bizarre fantasy world — think The Neverending Story meets Labyrinth meets Cirque de Soleil — where she must rescue the Queen of Light from the Queen of Darkness (both of whom are also played by McKee).
Sort of a latter-day Dorothy or Alice, Helena gave Leonidas the kind of opportunity most of us hardly dared to dream of while watching David Bowie strut sexily through Labyrinth. “[MirrorMask] is one of those kids’ films you were always wanting to do when you were young,” Leonidas says. “I feel like I won a big adventure.”
It was an adventure that she was more than ready to embark upon, having spent the first years of her career in the more mundane environs of British television. Growing up in a family full of actors — only one of her three siblings (“the sane one”) doesn’t want to act — Leonidas signed with an agency when she was 10. After getting her start in theater, she moved on to gritty TV miniseries that tended to cast her as the archetypal nightmare teen. “Just before doing MirrorMask, I did something where I killed someone, and then I killed myself,” she says with a laugh. “My dad said, ‘Every time I turn on the telly, you’re crying. When are you going to stop crying?’”
The world of MirrorMask, populated as it is by flying books, talking sphinxes, airborne giants, and vengeful royalty, provided a welcome alternative to teenage delinquency and suicide. Even while shooting against the blue screen, Leonidas reflects, the filmmakers “made everything so vivid. The storyboards were just amazing, and Dave [McKean, the film’s director] got so carried away with explaining things. It was crazy seeing these things come to life. It was like seeing me visit another world. I can’t wait to see it again.”
Since completing MirrorMask, Leonidas, 21, has moved on to new projects, such as The Feast of the Goat with Isabella Rossellini and Eileen Atkins, and a still largely un-cast film set during the children’s crusades. She experienced an alternate universe of another stripe when she was cast with Joan Allen in Sally Potter’s Yes, which is spoken entirely in iambic pentameter. “That was good fun,” Leonidas says. “[Sally had] written it like Shakespeare. We had a bit of rehearsal time at first, but then it became quite normal. Just like blue screen.”
Comments
Please login to be able to comment on this article.
more