The Hardest Part Of Filming The Vault For Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey - Exclusive
Lorraine, one of the members of the team recruited to break into the Bank of Spain in The Vault, can do pretty much anything. Need someone to crack a safe? Yeah, she can do that. What about posing as an art expert while affecting an Italian accent? Sure, Lorraine can do that too. She can also zipline across buildings, handle a gun, and rock a wig. Whatever you ask of her, she's game. Judging from Looper's exclusive interview with Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey, the actress who plays Lorraine, she's pretty much the same way. When asked what types of skills she'd bring to a heist team, Bergès-Frisbey compares herself to a Swiss Army Knife: "A lot of people call me that as a description because I'm handy and I'm physical and I can be, I don't know, I could actually be someone different," she says. "But not a fighter," Bergès-Frisbey adds with a laugh.
Bergès-Frisbey's filmography supports her claims. While her two major English-speaking roles were in fantasy films — she's the mermaid Syrena in Pirates of the Carribean: On Stranger Tides and the mage in King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, Guy Ritchie's fresh re-imagining of the classic Arthurian legends — her big breakout role came in the 2008 historical thriller The Sea Wall. Since then, she's starred in comedies, sci-fi romances, and now, a heist film.
That kind of versatility only comes with hard work. "Obviously, any sort of training I could, I did. I try in general to do [training]," Bergès-Frisbey says. According to the actress, The Vault in particular took a lot of effort — not in the least because Bergès-Frisbey, a native of Spain, had to speak English, which is not her first language.
How The Vault's international cast and crew made filming more challenging
Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey is fluent in many languages, including Spanish, Catalan, French, and Italian. However, her career was well underway before she spoke English. As she tells Looper, she spoke almost no English when she filmed Pirates of the Carribean, forcing her to communicate with the cast and crew using sign language. More than 10 years later, Bergès-Frisbey is totally conversant in English and from watching The Vault, you'd think she'd been speaking it her entire life. But it wasn't as easy as it seems. "It was exhausting for me to have to work on this English-speaking character that also speaks with a different accent that I have," she says. Apparently the international cast and crew didn't help, either. "The director would talk to me in Spanish, and then the DP would talk to me in Catalan."
In order to keep it all straight, Bergès-Frisbey had one request. "I remember the first time I met [director] Jaume [Balagueró], I was like, 'I'm going to ask one thing. I need you to talk to me in English.'" Bergès-Frisbey also hoped that co-stars like Liam Cunningham and Freddie Highmore, who are from Ireland and England respectively, would make things a little better, since they'd be speaking mostly English. But then the other shoe dropped. "[Balagueró] was like, 'Well, Freddie speaks perfect Spanish,'" Bergès-Frisbey recalls. "I'm like, 'Oh my God, this is going to be pretty much impossible for me.'"
But she pulled it all together, and while the shoot was challenging, you can't tell in the feature film. Sure, The Vault has an international flavor — it was filmed entirely in Spain, after all — but Bergès-Frisbey delivers her lines like a pro.
The Vault is currently in theaters and available via video-on-demand.