Having a stranger move into your home for a full week to quite literally watch your every move and determine if you’d be a suitable parent may be uncomfortable, but for Elizabeth Olsen and Alicia Vikander, that discomfort made “The Assessment” all the more enjoyable.
Now in theaters, the film — which marks the feature debut for director Fleur Fortuné — centers on Mia (Olsen) and Aaryan (Himesh Patel), a couple hoping to become parents. The thing is, in this future dystopia, it is illegal to conceive a baby naturally.
Instead, each couple must go through “assessment,” in which a government official comes to stay in their home and determine if they’d be fit parents.
That determination is made not just by watching these people, but by thrusting them into situations they might face as parents — so yes, a fully grown adult starts acting like a child. In this case, that adult assessor is Virginia (Vikander). Her entire job is to throw Aaryan and Mia for a loop, and she’s successful at it.
And while that may be hellish for the couple, it made things more fun for the actors themselves.
“I think a thing that’s almost easier is to be thrown off and uncomfortable,” Olsen explained to TheWrap. “And then the thing that I think Alicia and I together tried to layer in is when these women do come together, and there’s a bit of a transference and connection between the two of them, and what that means to both of them, without revealing too much about their backstories and their own experiences.”
“And I think those moments of how the alliances were shifting was really a nice dance that we got to play within the game of it all,” she continued. “And then, it’s when the human part creeps up on you. Fleur, [our director] had said, ‘It’s all fun to a point, and then it becomes very human.’ And so I think being able to layer those in throughout, it was a nice challenge in detail and specificity.”
It also brought the women closer as actors and professionals, according to Vikander.
“The scenes when you have to make much more kind of intense, and difficult, and hard scenes, then you actually need to be even closer to colleagues in that sense, because you know that you need to get to some place that might be uncomfortable,” she explained.
That said, the movie is a fairly heavy one. And according to Olsen, there were parts that were “more frustrating” for her to shake off at the end of the day. Even so, the actresses thoroughly enjoyed digging in on that feeling
“I think the thing that does serve us, or the thing that we’re most curious about, is … giving yourselves the permission to explore what it feels like to have these fears,” Olsen explained. “Explore what it feels like if these were situations that you could be put in.”
“I think the thing that this film allows, which I was really grateful for, because of the community of actors, and because of Fleur and the script, is it allowed for us to get to an edge and figure out how to push beyond it.”
You can watch TheWrap’s full interview with Elizabeth Olsen and Alicia Vikander in the video above.
