Seeker: The Dark Is Rising, The : Amelia Warner Interviews


Amelia Warner (Maggie Barnes)

Amelia Warner was born in Liverpool, Merseyside on June 4, 1982 and is the only child of British actress Annette Ekblomand and actor Alun Lewis. Relocating to London when she was 4 years old, she studied at the Royal Masonic School for Girls, at 16, the College of Fine Arts in London and then history of art at Goldsmiths College in London.

She was spotted by an agent after she and her friends devised and acted out a play in Covent Garden and won a place at London Royal Court Theatre's Youth program. Warner had a string of roles in TV dramas such as Casualty before making it big with the 2000 BBC adaptation of Lorna Doone and the film Quills.

Question: Give a brief introduction to your character…

Amelia:
I play a character called Maggie Barnes. She is quite new at the school and she gets posted with the Stanton family to try and get close to Will. She is kind of mysterious. What am I allowed to say ? She is not exactly what she says she is.

Question: How long have you been out in Romania?

Amelia:
I’ve been kind of lucky, I’ve been in and out doing small bits. The longest I have been here has been two weeks.

Question: How has it been making a movie here?

Amelia:
It’s been strange, because it’s half a Romanian crew and half an American crew — the dynamic is quite strange.

Question: How would you describe the film?

Amelia:
It’s like a fantasy-action thing. It is different to say a Harry Potter in that it is designed to feel more real. Will is a normal boy, in a normal village, who discovers this extra dimension. I guess it should be fun and look amazing, be quite magical.

Question: Are you into this kind of thing?

Amelia:
Not really, I am sure I would have been when I was 12. The books have been around for a long time, I’ve not read them but I have spoken to some people who have and love them. I kind of missed the boat on them. There are really good people involved, it’s a big film, really good people. It’s a different kind of thing for me to do.

Question: How much interaction have you had with Ian McShane and the other ‘Old Ones’?

Amelia:
They are great, when they arrived — I was here with the first group of people — it was light relief, it was just humour, and not being so earnest and serious about everything. Silly games on set, it was really nice on set.

Question: A very British book, what do you think to the changes?

Amelia:
They have changed things, made it more American. It is still set in England, with English pagan mythology, it’s just that the family is American.

Question: What is your take on David L. Cunningham?

Amelia:
He’s great, it's a very different thing for him to be doing. It is so complicated, doing these scenes, four or five cameras, all this technological stuff. He’s just there at this monitor. It’s finding the balance between what we’ve got to do, and all that other stuff.

Question: How have you found all the technical elements of the scenes?

Amelia:
There are just so many other things, what you are doing is a really small part of a huge thing. It can be frustrating; it’s quite nice having a lot of cameras on you, capturing you. It is very slow.

Question: Have you had any scenes with snakes?

Amelia:
No! I would like to have seen the snakes. I don’t like snakes, but I do not like snakes. Apparently the cobra was beautiful. They have an albino cobra. They are really warm when you feel them — it’s really strange.

Dark Is Rising is released in cinemas nationwide on October 19th.