There are many reasons actors might need to be kept apart on a set. Sometimes it’s personal, but more often than not, it’s a way to ensure the actors get more genuine reactions when their characters first meet onscreen. Keeping Margot Robbie and Saoirse Ronan separate on “Mary Queen of Scots” helped the pair create a much more emotionally charged scene when they filmed their onscreen meeting as the doomed Mary (Ronan) and her isolated and cold cousin Elizabeth (Robbie), but sometimes actors and their directors are looking for a very different kind of emotional charge.
In an oral history of Sofia Coppola’s underrated historical drama “Marie Antoinette,” actor Jamie Dornan revealed that he and star Kirsten Dunst, who plays the young German noblewoman who suddenly became the queen of France, didn’t meet one another until they filmed their first scene together. It worked out beautifully because Dornan plays the mysterious Swedish count Axel Fersen, who ends up in a torrid love affair with the lonely young queen. There are some serious sparks in the scene, and not just because both actors are so talented and gorgeous.
Director Sofia Coppola intentionally kept the actors apart
Director Sofia Coppola, daughter of “The Godfather” director Francis Ford Coppola and an incredible storyteller in her own right, apparently wanted to keep Dornan and Dunst separate in order to really catch their potential chemistry as authentically as possible. Dornan explained in the oral history that Dunst didn’t even get to see Dornan until the two saw on another on-camera while filming their characters meeting:
“My first day was the masked ball scene at the Palais Garnier with hundreds of extras. Sofia had cleverly arranged it so that Kirsten and I didn’t meet until we met in the scene. I was kept in the shadows until we rolled the cameras so that was the first time we ever spoke to each other. It was an incredible way to get thrown into the character.”
It’s truly a testament to how great of an actor Dornan is, because not only was he thrown into the character without getting to even meet his co-star first, but “Marie Antionette” was also his first major movie role. That meant that poor Dornan was exceptionally nervous, as he told Dunst in a Variety Actors on Actors interview in 2022, but it all turned out alright in the end because in this instance, Coppola knew what she was doing.
Marie Antoinette’s complicated love story taps into themes Coppola regularly captures
It’s incredible to think that “Marie Antoinette” was the first big role for Dornan, who has now become famous for roles ranging as widely as Christian Grey in the “Fifty Shades of Grey” films to serial killer Paul Spector opposite a detective played by Gillian Anderson on the BBC 2 series “The Fall.” His scenes with Dunst feel effortless, and that’s likely because Coppola tried to create a party-like atmosphere on set to help the actors get into character as the decadent ruling class. Though “Marie Antoinette” didn’t exactly kill it at the box office, bringing in only $60 million against its $40 million budget, the film has been reassessed over the years and people are finally starting to come around on just how great it really is. It even helped inspire “The Green Knight” director David Lowery while making his film, which is honestly a stellar achievement all on its own because “The Green Knight” is phenomenal.
“Marie Antoinette” is the tragic tale of a teenager pushed into a position she didn’t fully understand, a theme that’s repeated a few times in Coppola’s work (including in her most recent film, “Priscilla”). Whatever Coppola does next, it’s likely to be emotionally charged and full of incredible acting, because that’s what she does best.
