Haunting of the Mary Celeste Interview: Emily Swallow | CBR – CBR – Comic Book Resources

Haunting of the Mary Celeste star Emily Swallow explained why the real-life mystery behind the film's concept drew her to the project and more.

Haunting of the Mary Celeste is bringing horror to the high seas. In this supernatural psychological thriller, researcher Rachel takes her assistants Grant and Cassandra on her mission to discover what happened to the Mary Celeste, an American merchant ship whose crew mysteriously disappeared at sea. After boarding a boat captained by Richard Roundtree's Tulls and his crewman Aldo, the disparate group finds themselves caught in a rift between dimensions, from which they may never return.

Speaking to CBR, Haunting of the Mary Celeste star Emily Swallow, who plays Rachel, broke down her experience working on the film. She explained how the real-life mystery behind the film's concept drew her to the project, as well as how she relates to Rachel's insatiable drive. She recalled what it was like to work with director Shana Betz and how they filmed the movie on an actual boat. She also teased her favorite moment, revealed which horror movie scares her the most and more.

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CBR: What would you want viewers to know about The Haunting of the Mary Celeste before they sit down to watch it for the first time?

I'm personally fascinated by it being inspired by a maritime mystery that's still not really solved. I just think that that's so cool, because we feel like we can figure everything out these days. So that's something that's so fascinating to me.

I guess I would also want them to know that it's obviously kind of a psychological thriller. There's also, I think, at the core of it, it's compelling. One of the reasons that the script was appealing to me is that at the core of it, there's this very human story of this woman who's so obsessed with figuring something out, putting something together, finding answers, being proven right, that she kind of drives herself and all the people around her to disaster. I'm always intrigued by people like that. It's fascinating to get inside the head of somebody with that kind of obsession.

Which aspect of the character do you relate to the most and why?

I relate to being consumed by work and being consumed by something that is, in some ways, incredibly satisfying, but that can never fully satisfy you. I mean, I think I feel that way about a lot of my creative work. I love it. I'm passionate about it. I love getting to connect to people, I love having new experiences. And yet, I finish one thing, and then I'm like, "Okay, when's the next one?" There's never an end to that.

So I definitely relate to the obsession that she has. Fortunately, I don't think I would take it to the lengths that she does -- I try to keep that in check -- but I can at least relate to the the core of that.

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I was delighted to see this film was helmed by a woman director, but how did that change your experience on set?

Oh, it was so, so wonderful. I would use the word luscious, because Shana [Betz] is so smart. She comes from an acting background, and so she also was very attuned to the fact that we had this script that's pretty bare bones. You don't get a lot of details about these people. And certainly, the central character is the the mystery of the story and the thriller part of it. But within that, you have to have real people, or why do you care?

There's so many scary movies, and they do so many different things. I think this one, one of the appealing things is that it does have these very flawed humans and you need to find ways to connect to them. So Shana, she really -- we got to rehearse scenes, we did a lot of improvisations to try to figure out what on earth led these people to this place where they are. That was something that was such a huge gift that she gave us, and I think also it helped her help me connect to this character and connect to the mother in her who has lost her daughter and lost her mind because of that. She's not really thinking clearly about a lot of decisions!

We also had a female DP [Director of Photography], and the two of them working together were just a dream team. And Raquel [Fernndez Nuez], you know, we're shooting on this janky old boat that looks like it's about to sink on screen -- it felt like it was about to sink every time we were on it -- and Raquel would cram herself into corners to get just the right shot, because it wasn't like a set, where you can take out a wall and put your camera there. You just had to fit in the space. They were just a power duo that way. They would go to any lengths to get the right angle, to get the right atmosphere, to work out the scene the right way. So it was awesome.

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As I was watching, something that struck me about the movie was how a lot of the shots were tight on faces. How did that impact the way you approached your scenes?

Yeah! I tried not to think about it as much as possible! [laughs] There's so many things, when you're acting, that you just have to block out. It's funny, because you can do all this work to bring something to a character, but if you can't block out all the distractions, it doesn't matter.

That was an area where Shana also really helped, because she would guide us into the scene and she was very aware when something was playing too big for those tight shots. She was just so patient and so, so confident in guiding us to the right place and maybe just doing it again, doing it again, taking the scene and improvising a few moments leading into it and getting us to that place of relaxation, because otherwise, I think that those tight shots would have been horrific, because there would have been all sorts of schmacting going on and you wouldn't really have a way into those characters' minds. They'd be alienating and you'd be like, "Okay, you're all faking it. It's ridiculous."

Tell me a little about those underwater sequences and what the process of filming them looked like for you.

Oh, it was very cool. It was after we'd finished -- so we shot everything with the boat up in the Bay Area, kind of around South Toledo. I just remember driving out in the desert outside of LA to this big pool. It's a pool that they use for shooting, and all of the actors, we were just wearing the clothes that we had to wear and we would have to have a scuba tank and take a breath and then go down and play out whatever vignette she had and try not to breathe, like not have bubbles. It was so surreal.

I've spent a lot of time in the water, but I've never done anything quite like that. It was such a cool feeling, and then seeing it was really exciting, because I didn't know quite what it was going to look like. It was an adventure! We're doing it in the middle of the night. So it was all just like, "What's going on here?" but it was really fun.

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Richard Roundtree is basically a legend, so I'd love to hear about your experience working with him.

I mean, he is just delightful. He's so lovely. He's such a generous actor. He's such a down-to-Earth guy. Of course, he's done so many incredible things. I think he's at the point where he's like, "I've seen it all." But he was just such a -- working on an independent film like that, where you're trying to scrape a lot of things together, in some ways, you feel like you have a lot of time and in some ways, you don't at all, dealing with budget constraints, you really have to have actors who are just on the team and ready to do the work. He was such a team player.

I definitely fangirled a little bit at first, because he is a legend, like you said, but I found it so easy to connect to him. I loved those scenes that we got to play together, because there is something unspoken between those two; they kind of get each other. Every scene with him, it was fun. Sometimes, he would just go off on some random tangent and improvise something, something bizarre, but it all wound up bringing us back to these great moments and how those scenes played out. So I was so happy that I got to work with him.

Can you tease the one scene you just can't wait for viewers to see?

I think maybe the first moment that we get to see the physical representation of what this rift is. That was something, when I was reading it, I was like, "What on earth is this going to look like?" And that was something that was really in Shana's imagination, like how do we put that image on screen in a way that -- like, it's not something literal that you can play out. There's something that's a little poetic about it.

That's one of the reasons I loved working with her, too, is that there were very creative ways that she found to create these moments of mystery and to make it something that your brain doesn't quite know what it's seeing. I think that that mystery around it serves the film well. So yeah, I think maybe the first moment that that happens, I'm excited to see how people -- whether they dig it or not.

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'Tis the season, so I'd love to hear about your favorite horror movies and perhaps the ones that influenced your role in Haunting of the Mary Celeste.

I don't know if there was a horror movie that inspired me. I think that the movie that will always scare me the most is Arachnophobia, because I am truly terrified of spiders. [laughs] So that's the first one that comes to mind. But yeah, I'll have to think about that one for a while, if there was one that actually inspired this particular character. There's nothing that comes to mind immediately.

What do you hope viewers will take away from the film?

I mean, I hope that they get a good little thrill, and I really hope that they connect to the heart of it, because I feel like that's one of the things that is a little different from some horror -- I don't even know if I call it a horror movie. It's like a spooky thriller. I don't know! But I think that what's compelling to me is that the driving force for all the events, all the scary things that happened and all the bad things that happened to these characters, is this woman's obsession and her inability to let go of this thing. Yeah, I hope that people connect to that, and then I hope that they have a few moments where they jump. [laughs] That's all I wish!

Directed by Shana Betz, Haunting of the Mary Celeste stars Emily Swallow, Richard Roundtree, Alice Hunter, Ava Acres, Dominic Devore and Pierre Adeli. The film is now available on VOD platforms.

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Meagan Damore has served as a CBR Editor since January 2015, though she got her start as a staff reviewer in 2013. She discovered comics thanks to the plethora of movies and television she grew up with, like Batman: The Animated Series, Spider-Man, the original X-Men film trilogy, X-Men: Evolution and Justice League Unlimited. She picked up her first comic in high school and fell instantly in love with the medium. Later, she took her love for pop culture with her to college, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts from Suffolk University and a Masters Degree in Literature from University of Massachusetts Boston. She loves to apply her education to her work writing editorials and conducting interviews. You can catch her writing on Agents of SHIELD, the Arrowverse and more right here on CBR.

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Haunting of the Mary Celeste Interview: Emily Swallow | CBR - CBR - Comic Book Resources