The waif-like actress spends much of the movie
reclining in a skimpy red slip — and sometimes nothing at all — on a
cold porcelain table in a mortician’s preparation room.
“My spine and the back of my hips got bruised on the
first day,” explains the former child star of “Mermaids” and “The
Addams Family,” who had flown in to L.A. from
“I had to lie back down on the bruises,” she says of
her many scenes supine on that table. “Finally, the doctor came and he
said, ‘All I can do is give you painkillers.’ The crew tried to warm
the table for me. Someone brought in an electric blanket. … But it
was November and we were in a poorly insulated warehouse in
Clearly, Ricci is no stranger to suffering for her
art. This is the actress who spent large chunks of time half naked and
chained to a radiator for 2006’s “Black Snake Moan.” And “After.Life”
was no less demanding. Co-written and directed by first-time feature
filmmaker,
Anna comes to the attention of the efficient and creepy mortician Eliot (
when she attends a funeral. And that’s when the movie takes a turn for
the weird. After she has a fight with Paul, a weepy Anna appears to die
in a car crash.
Or does she?
When she wakes up she sees a white light; not the
warm, inviting one described by those who believe they have brushed up
against the afterlife, but a cold, sterile glare from the fluorescent
light in the preparation room at Eliot’s mortuary.
She insists she’s still alive. Eliot, who says that
he can communicate with the dead, tells Anna she’s fighting her demise
and begins to prepare her body. She, of course, resists.
Despite the frightening nature of the film, Ricci
hesitates to call “After.Life” a horror movie. “For me, the script read
much more like a sort of character piece,” she explains. “I kind of
missed the scariness of it because I was sort of taken in by this
question of death and if you have feelings after you’re dead. If I woke
up tomorrow dead, how would I feel? That’s what I talked to Agnieszka
about when I first met her.”
Ricci liked the fact that she got to “sit in the
middle of what it would be like to be dead. Anna has to believe at a
certain point she is. I think in the beginning she believes it too.”
The actress put her trust in Neeson, who made the film before the death of wife
“When you are in a situation with another actor this
dynamic starts to exist where you have to trust and you have to give
over to them,” she says. “I think that relationship is very organic to
the situation.”
When making a movie, Ricci doesn’t socialize much,
preferring to ruminate over her parts in her hotel room. Eventually,
the characters begin to invade her psyche.
“Anna was really creeping in one morning when I woke
up and looked in the mirror and said, ‘Oh, my God, I am so pale. I have
gone Goth!'”
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WHERE YOU’VE SEEN CHRISTINA RICCI
Born in
where she was discovered at age 8 in a school play. After doing
commercials, she was cast as Cher’s youngest daughter in 1990’s
“Mermaids” and received acclaim for her comedic work as the morbid
Wednesday Addams in 1991’s “The Addams Family” and 1993’s “Addams
Family Values.” She also starred in the popular 1995 kid’s flick
“Casper.”
Ricci began to take on more substantial roles with
nomination for 1998’s “The Opposite of Sex.” Since then, Ricci has done
television — “
Grace” — major studio pictures such as 1999’s “Sleepy Hollow” and
2008’s “Speed Racer,” and indie films such as “Buffalo ’66,” “Prozac
Nation,” “Monster” and “Black Snake Moan.” Currently filming the period
drama “Bel Ami” in
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