Youthful British actress Juno Temple has been turning heads for a few years now, in films from “Atonement” to Gregg Araki‘s “Kaboom,” even coming out of the disastrous comedy “Year One” smelling of roses. We’ve had our eye on her for a while, but even we weren’t prepared for how good she turned out to be in William Friedkin‘s “Killer Joe.”
As Dottie, the eccentric girl whose brother (Emile Hirsch) puts her up for sexual collateral in an attempt to pay off a hitman to kill their mother, she’s phenomenally good, coming across as child-like, innocent and yet worldly, all often in the space of a couple of gestures. It’s the finest turn in a film full of excellent performances, and it’s a good demonstration of why she’s rising so fast, to the extent that Christopher Nolan has cast her in a mysterious role in “The Dark Knight Rises.”
We caught up with Temple in Toronto, where she was promoting “Killer Joe,” and while she unsurprisingly stayed mum on the Batman epic, telling us “I can’t talk about the movie,” she did spill some beans on a few more upcoming projects. She’ll next be seen on screen as the Queen of France, and the love interest of hero D’Artagnan, in Paul W.S. Anderson‘s “The Three Musketeers,” and Temple said that the film was something of a dream come true: “The thing that’s so fun about the movie is it fulfills a childhood fantasy to be able to play a Queen, you know? But at the same time, I wanted to take it seriously… [the character] is actually fifteen. And I mean I don’t know if I look 15 on screen, but the idea of playing a girl that at 15 had that much power at her fingertips and had to be that savvy… it was a great role.”
There were other bonuses of doing the film, too, namely working with the undoubtedly impressive cast that Anderson has assembled. “I had a scene with Christoph Waltz in that movie, who I think is extraordinary, and we had a moment in the scene where we kind of challenge each other a little bit, and that was an exciting thing for me. And Milla Jovovich was one of the main reasons I wanted to do that movie because I loved her so dearly, and she’s wonderful. And she’s been so kind with me, and she’s just such a beautiful person inside and out.”
Once she’s wrapped up her Gotham City adventure, it looks like she’ll move on to an independent project that was announced earlier in the summer, “Magic Magic,” which will reunite her with her “Year One” co-star Michael Cera. Temple told us, “I play a young girl from America, and her and her best friend go to Chile…Michael Cera is an American boy who’s been living in Chile for a while so he’s kind of become Chilean and we go and have this adventure there. And my best friend’s visa gets stolen, so she has to go and fix that in the capital, and I get left on my own with this family. I don’t really know them, and my character loses her mind in a scary way. It’s an extraordinary script. Again quite dark, but it has humor in it too. And it’s a brilliant role.” While it doesn’t seem to have an immediate start date yet, Temple says “I really hope it happens before Christmas, I really do.”
Should “Magic Magic,” which is directed by “The Maid” director Sebastian Silva, and is set to co-star Emily Browning and Catalina Sandino Moreno, hit that date, it’s possible that we’ll see it on the festival circuit before the end of 2012. Meanwhile, “Killer Joe” just got picked up in Toronto, although it doesn’t yet have a release date, while “The Three Musketeers” will swash its buckle in theaters on October 14th. “The Dark Knight Rises” lands on July 20th, 2012.
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Dirty Girl (2010)
Little Birds (2011)
The Three Musketeers (2011)
Killer Joe (2011)
Small Apartments (2012)
Jack and Diane (2012)
