The Last Day reimagines Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece Mrs Dalloway in a few ways. The directorial debut of decorated visual artist Rachel Rose, the stark drama (which premieres Saturday night at Tribeca Festival) is set in modern-day New York and reimagines the protagonist, Clarissa, as Julia (Alicia Vikander), a writer feeling drained of creativity and purpose while navigating motherhood. Rose was inspired by her own experiences with postpartum depression: After she came out of that period, she revisited Mrs Dalloway on the advice of a friend and drafted the script months later.
The film’s more ambitious gambit, though, is what it does with the other half of its story. It beefs up — and gender-swaps — the role of Septimus, a traumatized veteran losing sight of reality, to operate in parallel with Julia. “When I reread Mrs Dalloway, I was so moved and blown away by Septimus, a character that I hadn’t absorbed before, that I now was absorbing through my own experience, in his manic mental anguish and pain.”
Here, the role is reimagined as Taylor, a younger mother of three who, as the film opens, has a passing encounter with Julia before trying to go on with her own day. She’s portrayed by Victoria Pedretti — who broke out on Netflix’s You before starring opposite Jeremy Strong on Broadway in An Enemy of the People — in a devastating performance befitting Woolf’s bruising, spare and subtle characterization. “Victoria is so primal, and she brings that to how she experiences space and her body,” Rose says.
What initially plays more like Julia’s story, as would be expected of a Mrs Dalloway interpretation, gradually shifts toward something darker and more complex: As Julia rediscovers herself, Taylor loses her grip entirely — leading to a tragic conclusion that Pedretti portrays with intricate, heartbreaking emotional insight. She spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about how she pulled it off.
You read the script for The Last Day while on Broadway for An Enemy of the People, which was obviously an intensive experience. How did it strike you in that context?
It’s interesting. At that point, we were a few months into doing the play, so it was a bit revitalizing to feel stimulated and inspired by reading something new. I am sure I drew inspiration from reading that, that came back to the play, especially when you’re doing the same story every night. It’s important to find different ways of continuing to connect to it and keep it fresh. Not that the story is very much like Enemy of the People at all, but anything that can just lay seeds for new ideas as you approach the same story every night is great.
You have to go to some deep, dark places here. What did you connect to in the role?
The feeling when I finished the script was an overpowering love for the character. I felt like I had an enormous amount of love and a protective instinct about Taylor and wanting to take on and protect her story. There were definitely conversations in the meeting of just — well, I feel like there is a large emphasis on people playing things that they themselves have experienced, and I’m not somebody who has had children. I haven’t gone through the hormonal shifts of pregnancy and postpartum. There’s no point in hiding that fact. I considered the fact that it might take me out of the running to play Taylor.
But our conversation ended up being so much about women and mothers generally, and how people in their lives create these illusions of normalcy and these illusions of perfection based on superficial stuff. A lot of how people don’t recognize what’s going on in Taylor. We were talking about how through a lot of her life, she probably was very exceptional and in many ways had a very normal life and somebody who was admired by a lot of the people around her for just seeming to be able to handle everything and how that doesn’t really truly exist for anyone. It’s always an illusion and it’s an enormous amount of pressure.
So what was it like to live in that skin? Was it difficult to shake off?
I shot this film for maybe a little over a month, but it involved me shooting for a few days and then having a large break in the middle where they shot all of Alicia’s work. Then it came back to me. It was incredibly sad. I found it amazing that, when I tried to take my mind to the places that she was at, I found it very easy to access. I found myself wanting to hold it but not swim in it for fear of drowning.
Which can be difficult.
Yeah, it’s dangerous. I’m trying to become more comfortable with talking about what can feel like an embarrassing aspect of the work, which is that I’m involving myself in my imagination and it does have a lot of power.
These weeks of waiting between the beginning and the end, I found myself really just wandering the streets, listening to music and holding it and just waiting. I felt like I was really in this holding pattern. Even in production, they say, you’re “on hold,” and there’ll be an H next to your name when the call sheet goes out. So I really held it, but I felt more as if I was standing on a cliffside and using an enormous amount of strength to stand there with one toe over the edge and just kind of look down at what is an inch away. It’s very much right there.
It’s not like I’m living day-to-day suicidal, whether that’s information that people need to know or not — but in the context of this, I guess it’s relevant. I don’t know what that goes to show because everybody’s an individual, but for me, it really emphasized the strength that we’re all using every day to just not look over the cliff, or on some days, to just hold it. The strength that it takes to keep walking and wandering and holding it when it’s just not time yet to put it down. I feel like I’m speaking a bit abstractly, but it is all very abstract.
It is. I would imagine that you would feel some degree of responsibility, in that you’re really telling a story about suicidal ideation. Is that fair to say?
Yes, incredibly. It was quite shocking. I knew that the story was slightly based on something that [Rose] had read, but then when I actually went to look into it, there was an enormous amount of responsibility that I found, in that there were many cases within that year when we shot the film. There were reports and news about women who had killed themselves and their children, and that was over the course of that year. I had those names written on Post-it notes in my house. I kept looking at it. I didn’t want to turn away from it. It’s uncomfortable, so I can understand the instinct to want to put it down or not delve all the way into it, but the reality is that these things are happening and women are going unnoticed.
The question is how does it get to that point without anybody helping or anybody intervening — how do we still not have enough research about women and what they need in support during postpartum, how much hormonal fluctuations can drive us mad? There are reports of suicide from all of these enormous hormonal fluctuations, and yet women are left in the dark and misinformed about what to expect. We’re so good at making things seem OK because we do have a built-in enormous tolerance for pain and discomfort. We’re not invincible, and so yes, there was a lot of heaviness being carried around representing these stories.
You’re describing a lot of research in understanding Taylor’s world and circumstances. Was it eye-opening for you?
Yes. I’m not surprised by the way in which women are let down by the medical industry a lot of the time. There had been four different murder-suicides in the year, and I hadn’t heard anything about it; that was absolutely eye-opening. You hear stories about postpartum. I’ve heard about it from my own mother. It’s very common, but to that extent, I was like, “How are we walking around day to day, not trying to contend with this, not trying to actively do something about it and put it into discussions just for the sake of alleviating any taboo?” Of course, suicide — there’s a lot of taboo around it already, but in this case specifically, it was shocking to me.
Were you familiar with Mrs Dalloway?
No, I hadn’t read Mrs Dalloway when I read the script. I’m not, honestly, the most well-read. (Laughs.) Fair enough. But I knew a bit about Virginia Woolf’s voice and her unique way of writing, and I don’t think you have to know anything about Mrs Dalloway to appreciate the script for the film.
This movie mirrors your and Alicia’s work throughout, even though you only have a small bit of screen time. Were you aware of each other’s experiences or process?
I have no idea what her process was. We didn’t speak very much. There’s one scene where we interact, where she kind of passed the baton over to me and we started working on my stuff. Even with coverage you are, most of the time, shooting separately. It’s incredible how much illusion can be created. Luckily, none of these things actually happened to anybody on set. We were able to tell this story and we did manage to still have some fun, some real fun and play and enjoyment. I am a deep believer in that.
Even though it’s uncomfortable, I don’t like to harp on how it is hard because at the end of the day, it was pretend. It has an effect, but I think it is really important to try to stay buoyant in it and have some fun with it as well. I hope it’s not uncomfortable to say that. I get annoyed with all these actors where I’m like, “Are we supposed to just kvetch about how it’s hard??” It’s like, “Duh, it’s art.” It’s hard to bring something from your mind into the world, but it’s such a privilege. This was a lucky get, playing Taylor.