Interview: Adria Arjona and Adam Wingard on ‘Onslaught’
It’s been a meteoric few years for Adria Arjona. After breaking out with scene-stealing turns in Andor, Hit Man and Blink Twice, the actress has cemented her status as one of Hollywood’s most sought-after talents, most recently starring in and executive producing the Cannes-premiering comedy Splitsville. Now she delivers arguably her most ferocious performance yet in Onslaught, the new A24 action-thriller that marks writer-director Adam Wingard‘s return to his stripped-down genre roots following Godzilla vs. Kong and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.
Set over one terrifying day in the barren New Mexico desert, Onslaught follows Celeste (Arjona), a single mother and former Army sniper grappling with PTSD, who lives inside a remote trailer-park community with her young daughter Daisy (Blake Kennedy). When three genetically engineered super-soldiers escape containment from a nearby secret government compound, Celeste must rely on her elite combat skills, her neighbors and her fierce maternal instincts to survive a brutal hours-long siege. Dan Stevens, Rebecca Hall, Drew Starkey, Michael Biehn, Reginald VelJohnson, Eric Wareheim and UFC champion Alex Pereira round out the film’s inspired, eclectic ensemble.
Beneath its pulpy ’80s-inflected spectacle, Onslaught is a film about a woman who loves her daughter deeply without being remotely ready for her, and it refuses to sand down that messiness. For Arjona, that refusal was precisely the appeal.
“Oh, absolutely,” she says of whether Celeste’s rough edges made her more interesting to play. “It just gave more layers to Celeste as a woman and as a mother. She has a lot of demons and she’s trying, man. She’s really trying, and unfortunately it’s the wrong weekend. She had other plans. She was doing her job and she was just chilling. She wanted to collect all the rent payments, go get drunk and just chill out. And then here’s her baby girl. Of course she’s excited, she’s just not ready.”
In fact, Arjona reveals she built an entire private theory around the idea that Daisy is not a liability for Celeste but the very thing that keeps her alive. “I have this theory in my head that if Blake wouldn’t have been there, and the super-soldiers would have come and Celeste would have been on her own, I don’t know if she would have survived,” she muses. “Everything comes out of her because it’s feral. She just becomes this animal trying to protect her cub, and I think that’s what makes Celeste.”
The predators circling that mother and cub are among the year’s most unnerving screen villains: silent, bullet-deflecting killing machines built by a Nazi scientist under U.S. government contract, described in the film as the human equivalent of heat-seeking missiles. And while the super-soldiers carry the DNA of Michael Myers and the Terminator, they also feel unsettlingly tied to the current moment, something Wingard admits caught even him off guard.
For Wingard, the resonance was less a case of deliberate commentary than of something in the air. “When you’re tapping into something in a movie, if we had decided from the beginning, oh, we want to do a movie that’s referencing something happening in America right now, by the time we’d actually made it, it would have been yesterday’s news,” he explains. “But weirdly, the zeitgeist was in the air. I think we tapped into something, maybe even subconscious, and it kind of synced up.”
At the film’s emotional center is the bond between Celeste and Daisy, and Arjona gushes about her seven-year-old co-star, whose casting came at the end of a search through hundreds of audition tapes. “First of all, she’s fantastic. She’s incredible, and our dynamic in real life is very much like the characters’, because she’s so mature for her age and I am so immature for mine,” Arjona laughs. “Because she’s so little and it’s her first movie, everything in me was like, I just want to make sure she has the best experience possible. I want to protect her and make sure she feels safe. So there were a lot of conversations about the blood. We also had this fun little game where we would do two Spanish words a day, one before and one after lunch, so I would teach her Spanish.”
That off-screen protectiveness paid off in an unexpected way during one of the shoot’s gorier stretches. “Towards the end of the film, we were doing a double-take, so I had to use my stunt double as well as myself,” Arjona reveals. “Unfortunately, Blake wouldn’t work with my stunt double because she was afraid of the blood. But she would work with me while I had the blood on. I was like, oh wow, she trusts me. She trusts me that much that she’s putting me back into the trenches. I was like, great, I’ll be there for her.”
Onslaught is now playing in theaters.