ComingSoon Editor-in-Chief Tyler Treese spoke to Carry-On star Danielle Deadwyler about her role in the holiday action movie and the recent hot streak she has been on as an actress. Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, the action thriller is now streaming on Netflix.
“A young TSA agent (Taron Egerton) fights to outsmart a mysterious traveler who blackmails him into letting a dangerous package slip onto a Christmas Eve flight,” says the logline.
Tyler Treese: Danielle, you’ve had a really phenomenal year, and Carry-On really caps it off. I loved you in Parallel and The Piano Lesson. How’s it been seeing all this work really continue to pay off? Because you’ve been getting all these interesting roles and really strong films. You’re on a roll right now.
Danielle Deadwyler: Man, thank you so much. It’s wild. You just put your head down, and you do the work, and then you trust who you’re going into the jungles of cinema with. And then it’s fun to see what they come up with because I don’t watch playback for anything. It’s about trusting my directors. It’s about trusting the team. And so it’s a delight to see it because I see it with people, and so I’m fresh-eyed to everything as well because I get to have that experience as an audience member. But in conjunction with that, I get to have these memories come up when the scenes come up. So I’m learning anew as the audience learns anew, when I see the work. So it’s good.
That trust in your director is definitely paying off here. I love your character in this. There’s a great determination, even though it’s the holidays, and it’d be so easy not to investigate every lead. She’s all in on doing her best. What did you find most interesting about Alina?
I think that’s so critical, what you just said. Even though the holidays come, even though you may have tryptophan or whatever it is from the turkey in your system, you still have to do your work. You have to be focused, you have to play it all the way out. And I think the beauty of her is that she follows her intuition. She has a discipline of herself in the way that she presents herself, in the way that she keeps persisting to understand something based on her own knowledge of it, her own intuitive raw senses. That’s something that I think is valuable. And you know, I learn from the roles that I play, and so I’m learning that that’s something to keep pushing forward for.
What’s really fun as a viewer in this film, is that your character is very much on the periphery at first. So once you finally start interacting with Taryn and some other members of the main cast, there’s that anticipation. What did you like most about that structure? Because there’s a real buildup and it makes it feel really meaningful.
Yeah, it’s fun. Everybody has, it’s like you’re in your own silo of a track, but you know that your tracks overlap. And when you finally do get to overlap, how delightful and fun to come and be with Sofia [Carson], how delightful and fun to be with Taron [Egerton], how delightful and fun to be with Theo [Rossi] and Logan [Marshall-Green], right? It just shows you how interwoven humanity is when you think about it like that. You do have your own thing, and then you do have your things together. I think that that’s what this is about, how the public interacts in all of these public spaces at these critical junctures, critical moments, Christmas time, the airport, the systems of what it means to be in this kind of place. And so, I think that’s what the experience of the film is like in making it. This overlapping of systems happening together.
Everybody has the debate with Die Hard, but we’re gonna get the same with Carry-On: do you believe this is a Christmas movie?
Are people even gonna be old enough? A lot of people, generationally, are they gonna be able to be like, “Is this a Christmas movie? Is this an action movie?” It is a Christmas and an action movie.
Perfect. You settled it.
Thanks to Danielle Deadwyler for taking the time to talk about Carry-On, which is out now on Netflix.
