Interview: Alistair Petrie on ‘Eight for Silver’
It’s always been a dream of Alistair Petrie’s to work with British filmmaker Sean Ellis. “I fell in love with his film Metro Manila,” says Petrie of Ellis. “I saw it quite by chance in a movie theater in London. I knew nothing about it. I literally had a couple of hours in between meetings and I saw the poster, and thought ‘Sure, whatever.’ I ended up loving the movie and his name came up in the credits. I thought, ‘What is this? Who’s this Brit guy who directed this film in Manila? How did that come about?’ I loved the movie and never forgot the name Sean Ellis. You put certain directors and writers on your sort of fantasy list and you stick it to the refrigerator in the hopes that one day they call and this one did.”
After an initial conversation, Ellis ended up sending the screenplay of his latest film Eight for Silver, a werewolf horror movie that made its world premiere at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, to Petrie, who says he was “thrilled” to read it. “I hadn’t done a sort of bigger horror feature before so I was completely intrigued by that and this sort of reimagining of the world’s so-called first horror story, which is a really hard sort of genre piece to pull off,” he explains. “But as soon as I started reading it, the werewolf aspects of it sort of melted into the background as I realized that this was a very kind of familial human drama, really. Then of course, I knew that both Boyd [Holbrook] and Kelly Reilly, both of who I’m a huge fan of, were attached. It came together really quickly and easily in many ways. It wasn’t hard to say yes.” The production process, which took place in a small commune in France, was a relatively smooth one, allowing for the members of the cast and crew to establish great friendships and working relationships that have lasted to this day. “Sean’s become a great friend,” reveals Petrie. “So have Boyd and Kelly. We had such a great time making this story and exploring it together. That was a great thing. We also got the opportunity to really explore this film and this script together before we started shooting and we kept doing so throughout the shooting [process] as well. It’s been a privilege to be a part of it. It really has.”
While Petrie may not have had the chance to star in a fully-fledged horror movie before, he did come close with the first installment of AMC’s horror drama anthology series The Terror, a haunting, harrowing tale of madness and isolation that bears a certain similarity to Eight for Silver. “The isolation is such a kind of key part to both of those stories,” he elaborates. “Without giving away any spoilers, there was kind of a direct parallel as well, which made me smile and which I hope audiences will discover. Eight for Silver is sort of a monster piece in the same way that The Terror is but both go much deeper and darker than that. They both have great parallels.”
Petrie’s character in Eight for Silver, a headstrong, no-nonsense husband and father who is just as emotionally detached as he is ambitious, is sort of the catalyst to the events in the film, causing the emergence of the werewolf that stalks the quaint English town in which they live in. It’s a touch, emotionally taxing role that asks a lot from its actor and Petrie delivers in spades, turning in an intense, searing performance that allows for audiences to sympathize with his character despite his misguided actions. “I was very excited to explore the character within the theme of the consequences of our actions,” he says. “This film speaks in a very sort of dramatic way to that, about the decisions that we make and how the people closest to us are affected by it, and that really interested me. I’m a father. I’m a husband. I have a family and the decisions that I take, that my wife takes, that we take together affect our entire lives so that’s a really fascinating human theme to investigate.”
The relationship between Petrie’s character, Seamus Laurent, and his wife, Isabelle, who is played by Reilly, is a fraught, emotionally complex one, the actors’ performances hinting at years of history together that the movie never explicitly spells out. It is a dynamic that Petrie worked closely with Reilly in order to develop and establish throughout the course of the movie. “I worked very closely together with Kelly given that [our characters] were in a marriage,” he reveals. “We spent a lot of time talking about who these people were, how they met, how they came together, what was the nature of their relationship? We were adamant and determined that these two people originally met and they fell in love, you know? We didn’t want to get stuck into that very sort of typical period sense of you know, ‘They married because they ought to marry, because their families forced them to.’ You don’t really see any of this backstory, but there is a beat in the film that we talked an awful lot about which sort of illustrated how these two people have once been in love but have lost each other. There’s a great sort of human sadness in that and I think that always speaks to the audience. It’s very small in the movie and it’s very subtle but we always had it in the back of our minds.”
Given that Eight of Silver is a werewolf film, it features many scenes of its characters interacting with the mysterious werewolf that terrorizes the townspeople throughout the course of the movie. According to Petrie, the cast had a life-size practical model of the werewolf that they were able to interact with during filming, something he feels “incredibly thankful” for. “We were so lucky. Normally, you would expect to be terrified of a tennis ball on a stick [during the production process of these movies], you know? That is the nature of things,” he reveals. “But we had four versions of the real thing, basically. We had one that was fully grown, literally the body of one [of the creatures] that was designed and made by the production and FX team. They were working on it for months and months. So we had that to look at. We also had one that was a sort of a suit that this huge Bulgarian dude sort of fit into [so that the creature] could move. So we really had it [on set] to play off of. That was pretty exciting. For the final product, however, there were aspects that were working and then some that weren’t quite working, so they said, ‘Okay, let’s do some CGI that we can lay on top of what we’ve already got just to enhance it, rather than redefine.’ So we had something very live, very present [on set] and then the CGI is the audience’s added bonus in many ways. The creature ended up being a really cool representation of all our fears. It’s not just the pointy teeth and hairy-backed monster running around attacking things. It’s much darker and more psychological, which was very cool to see.”
While Petrie has a long career full of wonderful performances in a variety of projects, including the aforementioned The Terror, Rogue One, Rush and The Night Manager, he is perhaps most known for his performance as Michael Groff, the overbearing headmaster in Netflix’s Sex Education, a cultural phenomenon that was watched by over 40 million viewers after its debut on the platform. Asked if he expected that type of response to the show, he responds in the negative. “You read a script and you think, ‘Wow. This is good’,” he explains. “You make a show with an amazing cast, all the elements are in place and you put it all in the bottle. You shake the bottle up and ultimately, you hope that an audience finds you because there’s a lot of product out there. I think we did know that what it was speaking to was important and heartwarming but you can never predict [the reaction your work will get].” Petrie says the third season of the show, which had to be put on pause due to the COVID-19 pandemic, is currently six weeks away from wrapping and will debut on Netflix this year.
Asked if he can provide details about the plot of the show’s third season, which has largely been kept under wraps, he laughs. “No, I can’t [give you any details] but I can tell you that new characters arrive and upset the proverbial apple cart,” he reveals. “New relationships start, old ones ends and some get rekindled. I think [the third season] is going to be really special. I really do. There’s an amazing buzz about it. I’m hugely looking forward to it. I get asked, ‘When is it coming out?’ on social media. That’s the primary question I get asked. We are working as fast as we can but it will be with us this year. I promise you that.”
Eight for Silver premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival on January 30, 2021.