All happy families are alike; each vampire family are vampires in their own way. In the new dark comedy The Radleys, Euros Lyn directs Kelly Macdonald as Helen Radley, and Damien Lewis as Peter Radley, recovering vampires who are forced to reveal the family illness to their children after one of them goes full Christopher Lee on a local boy. To hide the body, they call Uncle Will, Peter’s twin brother, who still lives as a vampire. As the Radley children come to grips with the choices their parents made in order to be like any other family, long kept secrets start to break the united front of Helen and Peter. I sat down with the trio ahead of the premiere to talk about vampire powers, addiction, and how to twin.
Damien, you’re playing you’re playing two versions of a vampire [twin brothers Peter and Will], Kelly you’re playing one [Peter’s wife Helen]. You’re only two actors. You have all these interpersonal relationships. How do you negotiate that as actors and as a director directing them to make cohesive for the viewer, but not necessarily spoon feeding them?
Damien Lewis: It’s really about subtext. And as an actor and a director, you would never direct subtext. You just do it. And as an actor, you must never act subtext. And when you see it, it’s bad. And so the life, is really, in essence, subtext, isn’t it? So, you just play play the story as it’s presented to you, as if everything you say is true.
Kelly Macdonald: I sort of struggled with [Damien playing twins], because I’m easily confused. He made it quite easy. It was never much of the issue I thought it was going to be in my head, because the characters he is playing are so different.
Damien Lewis: We had lots of conversations about this. I’m still full of self-doubt about whether we ended up in the right place or not as well, because there is a different way to go with it. There’s the version of doing Dead Ringers, where it’s it is literally impossible to tell [between twins]. But we did make but we did make a different decision where it’s a physical manifestation of the different lives that they choose to lead. It would have been less fun if you hadn’t made those choices.
Euros Lyn: I remember talking to the costume designer, because she has twins and she would and she said that when they’re both in the room or when they see one another in video, they know exactly who’s who because of how they just are. But when they see one another in a still photograph, even they find it quite difficult to tell the difference between them. So that was something that we definitely. There’s something about the essence of how William, he’s got a swagger and Peter is just a little more upright, you know. When we decided they would be twins-
Kelly Macdonald: When did that come about?
Euros Lyn: It was pretty early on when we were developing the script. And we were talking to to the writer a lot about how Will and Peter are two sides of the same coin, and it was all about their moral choices, not their destiny. It wasn’t their DNA. They both shared it, you know, and then we kind of thought that should be twin brothers. It should be the same base character who both went off in radically different positions. And and they both got the same weakness. They desire the vampires. But Peter has chosen to live radically, morally different lives, which I think is a really interesting premise to explore.
One of the other things that I was really struck by, obviously vampire movies, there’s a lot about addiction. There are these beautiful bursts of red in the first bit of the film. And then when some of the characters finally give in to the vampirism, you kind of expect a moment of everything’s colorful, everything’s amazing, but everything kind of goes a little flatter. The colors leave, which I feel like is a much more accurate to addiction. We become homogenized when we give in to those things and we forget the how joyful we can feel, how sad we can feel when we’re not relying on those things. How much was that baked into the direction?
Euros Lyn: Yeah, I think that that use of red, we made a decision very early on in the production design and costume design and makeup choices. And then again in the edit, it kind of reflects exactly the arc that you, you’ve just talked about.
When you were adapting it from the book, how much of that guided the process? How do you keep an adaptation from becoming a ‘Best of’ album of the original material?
Euros Lyn: Well, we we we we realized that we you can’t, adapt a novel which is a very dense, expansive, detailed 400 pages into a film that’s up to two hours. But you can take the essence of which was which was something we wanted to do. And we’ve made certain changes, like William Peter being twin brothers or,
Kelly Macdonald: No flying.
Euros Lyn: No flying. I know it’s a minor tragedy. But hopefully, fans of the novel will watch this film and recognize the novel they loved, and we will have caught the essence of some of the things that Michael [Haig, author] wanted to explore, like the nature of addiction or the moral choices we have in life, or that sense of imposter syndrome when we try and fit in in our communities and kind of bury our true selves in order to, be the same as our neighbors.
It’s a film about characters who I, as a director, have to love all of them. And I have to give them the space to flourish, to go on their arcs. And then when actors join, you know, you take on the mantle of caring for your characters and, and putting all the investment in them of keeping them, you know and making sure that they reflect aspects of the human existence and make the audience feel the same.
Is there anything that you’re hoping that gets added to the vampire canon in, you know, ten years when they do a a retrospective of vampire cliches? Is there anything you’re hoping this starts?
Kelly Macdonald: Repressed middle class vampirism!
The Radleys had its premiere in Edinburgh on 20th August and will be made available on Sky Cinema in Autumn 2024.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Erin Murray Quinlan is an award-winning director, playwright, and composer. She is an amateur beekeeper and a confirmed solver of Cain’s Jawbone. Her full biography can be found at www.erinmurrayquinlan.com.
