Interview: Taron Egerton and Ana Sophia Heger on ‘She Rides Shotgun’
In She Rides Shotgun, Taron Egerton plays Nate, an ex-con with a violent past, forced to go on the run with his estranged daughter Polly after a hit is put out on both of them. It’s an action thriller, but one that’s emotionally charged and deeply character-driven thanks to a phenomenal turn from Egerton, who delivers a haunting, searing performance as a man plagued with regrets. However, it’s eleven-year-old Ana Sophia Heger, in her first ever starring role, who carries most of the film on her shoulders.
“It was really fun and pretty easy because he’s really nice,” says Heger of building that central relationship with Egerton. “We just had to act like we didn’t really know each other in the beginning, and I just had to get more used to him throughout the movie — and that was obviously really easy because he’s so nice.”
Though the film is based on Jordan Harper’s novel of the same name, Egerton and Heger did not approach it from the same starting point. “My mom read [the novel],” says Heger. “I didn’t read it.”
“It’s maybe a little grown-up for [her],” adds Egerton. “It’s a bit grim at times. [She’ll] read it one day. I read it and I loved it, but it’s a very different story.”
The novel spans a much longer time period and leans harder into its more violent, pulpy tones, particularly when it comes to Nate training Polly to protect herself at all costs. “In the book, Nate is very actively, methodically coaching her in violence, which is not really as much of a feature in our movie,” he says. “There’s one scene where he’s showing her how to hit someone with a bat if things go really wrong. But the book has a heightened style where some of the bad guys are almost like monsters. The themes of drugs are more prevalent too, and we neutralized a lot of that because we really wanted to focus on the love story — this father-daughter love story.”
“It all happens over just three or four days,” he adds. “But the novel is amazing and I highly recommend it. I think we’ve been very faithful to the spirit of it. At the heart of it is the love between these two characters.”
Egerton also served as a producer on the film, a role that allowed him to take more ownership over the creative process. “I really wanted to get this film made,” he says. “By hook or by crook, I was gonna make sure it happened. I really enjoyed being a part of the core creative team. Sometimes just acting in something can feel not quite enough for me. It’s nice to feel like part of the filmmaking team.”
The film features a number of intense action sequences, most involving Polly as she, along with Nate, try to evade their pursuers across a violent, unforgiving landscape. Despite the scale and intensity of the action scenes, Heger says she always felt safe while filming them. “It wasn’t scary,” says Heger. “Taron always makes me feel really comfortable and welcome on set. But it’s also very intense, so I just have to feel like this is really happening in real life — and all this crazy stuff is happening and I can’t believe I have to be going through this.”
Egerton is quick to praise his young co-star, who led the film with a quiet confidence well beyond her years. One that, he says, extended not just through the film, but across the entire set as well. “This was Ana’s set,” he says. “She was number one on the call sheet. She’s the person who’s in the movie the most and she took that responsibility with incredible grace and incredible talent. She was very kind to everybody, very lovely to everybody, and she worked very very hard. Sometimes a bit too hard — there were moments where it was important to take a breath and calm down, because some of the scenes were very emotional. But she was amazing. I’ve never really met anyone like her, actually.”
And if a sequel were to happen, one that follows Polly’s journey following the events of the film, as author Harper has hinted, would Heger return?
“I’ve actually never thought of that,” she says. “That’d be pretty cool, but I kind of really like how it ends, and I would love it just to kind of stay like that. But it would be cool to do another film of her. Or Taron and I can just do another film that’s a different story.”
SHE RIDES SHOTGUN is now playing in theaters.