The Loved Ones has been gaining momentum at various festivals around the world this year and has been a massive hit with audiences. You can find all our coverage of the film here including my review of the film in which I described the film as delightfully demented.
The film is a pleasure to watch in part due to the wonderful performance by Robin McLeavy as Lola. We were lucky enough to sit down with Robin McLeavy at Frightfest this year and she filled us in on playing Lola and what’s next for her.
HeyUGuys
What excited you most about playing the character of Lola in The Loved Ones?
Robin McLeavy
Definitely the fact that she was psychologically unhinged and unstable. It’s also not often where you read a horror script where the woman is perpetrating all the violence and I found that really interesting and refreshing. I wasn’t much of a horror fan until I made the movie and then I had to watch quite a few horror films to get a sense of the genre and the style we were going for. Now I’ve been cured of my fear of horror… almost.
HeyUGuys
What female roles did you like in the horror films that you saw and what did you like about them?
Robin McLeavy
Kathy Bates in Misery was a definite key inspiration, in that obsessive nature. It’s always exciting to play characters who are obsessive because all their energy is so focused on that one thing and they’re eccentric because of it. I guess that idea that Lola just wants what normal teenage girls want, she just wants a boyfriend, but she has no vocabulary for a normal life, she’s been trained since she was six years old to torture people.
HeyUGuys
Do you see a lot of the motivation coming from her father then?
Robin McLeavy
Yeah, absolutely.
HeyUGuys
The film appears to comment on spoilt teenagers and the young girls that are given everything they want. Was this something you saw in the film?
Robin McLeavy
Yeah, the idea of a modern girl whose influenced by mass consumerism in terms of celebrities and getting inspiration for her sexual expression through people like Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, these kind of figures. That’s very much part of it. The dad’s spoiling her and giving her everything she wants, it’s like a Veruca Salt kind of thing going on.
HeyUGuys
There’s also a very uncomfortable relationship between the father and daughter.
Robin McLeavy
John Brumpton, who played my dad, and I talked about what their relationship was like and how we wanted there to be a real love between them but that teetered on something completely taboo and wrong and how we could communicate that. We talked about how little they would touch eachother so whenever we do touch it was this really powerful thing.
The tension of that relationship between father and daughter parallels the relationship between Lola and Brent and if Lola was a normal girl that it could actually work, but she is so psychopathic. It’s this weird triangle between them.
HeyUGuys
The father sees Brent as competition too.
Robin McLeavy
Exactly yeah and also Lola sees her mum as competition because it takes attention away from her.
HeyUGuys
Do you have a definite idea of the back story of the mother?
Robin McLeavy
The mother had tried to run away and to keep her at home, the father had given her a frontal lobotomy. He’d destroyed her will to escape.
HeyUGuys
Had they already starting taking boys at this point?
Robin McLeavy
Yeah and the mother was resistant to it and paid the price (laughs).
HeyUGuys
I’m guessing Lola was a lot of fun to play?
Robin McLeavy
Yeah it was heaps of fun.
HeyUGuys
Were there any hard moments though?
Robin McLeavy
Killing the mother was. After all the fun at the dinner table it was a hard scene.
HeyUGuys
There are a lot of times when you have to hold back too, in scenes like when Brent has to relive himself. That scene is so tense and hard to watch.
Robin McLeavy
It’s horrible isn’t it. That’s the most disturbing bit for me actually. It’s so sadistic. I can’t believe I did that!
HeyUGuys
Have you watched the film with an audience?
Robin McLeavy
I’ve seen at three festivals and the audiences are so brilliant to be amongst because they are so loud and responsive and they scream and cheer. And they cheer when I die unfortunately (laughs). I love that reaction, it’s great. I haven’t seen another movie where people are that vocal, it’s great. Sometimes I still get freaked out when I watch it but I find it quite hilarious as well, I still find it funny.
HeyUGuys
There’s black comedy throughout. Was that something that you liked when you read the script?
Robin McLeavy
I didn’t realise we were making comedy at the time until I watched it. In hindsight I can see it. When you take a character seriously there’s more room for comedy because you’re not aware of how absurd you are.
HeyUGuys
What do you have coming up next?
Robin McLeavy
I’m doing a film back home called Hollywood Ending. It’s a really cute film. It’s a spoof on American films and how they end with Hollywood endings, where everything ends happily ever after. Here the film then starts again and turns really nasty, but it’s not a horror.
HeyUGuys
Do you want to want to do more films than theatre work now?
Robin McLeavy
Yeah because I’ve been doing theatre pretty solidly for the past four years and I feel like I reached a little pinnacle with my last project and I really love working on film, it’s a completely different discipline.
HeyUGuys
Do you want to do more horror again at some point?
Robin McLeavy
Probably not in the next couple of years because I don’t want to be pigeon holed as the psycho (laughs).
HeyUGuys
Would you ever consider playing the victim role in a horror film?
Robin McLeavy
Never ever. I can’t do victim roles, it makes me sick.
The Loved Ones is released on DVD and Blu-ray today.
