Yahoo Movies Scream star Melissa Barrera talks about her new movie Carmen with Paul Mescal
Melissa Barrera, at first, was hesitant to sign onto a film like Carmen. "I'm always very careful about coming onto a project that touches upon immigration, because I'm so used to the stereotypes," says the Mexican actor, who first moved to the US to study musical theatre at New York’s Tisch School of the Arts.
"I'm so used to the narrative always being violence and struggle. And always, like, '¡Pobrecito!', '¡Pobrecito!', which means 'Oh, poor thing!' That's the lens through which these stories are told."
But Carmen, a dance-led adaptation that seeks to redefine the femme fatale of George Bizet's tragic opera, enthusiastically rejects all that is familiar, conventional, or simplistic. Lovingly ushered onto the screen by choreographer and first-time director Benjamin Millepied, it's an old story fully revitalised, now told through fluid movement, a mesmeric new score by Nicholas Britell, and a sense of poetry that borders on the metaphysical.
As played by Barrera, this Carmen is forced, after the death of her mother, to flee across the US-Mexico border in order to seek safety in a club owned by an old friend, Masilda (Rossy de Palma, a regular in Pedro Almodóvar's work). Along the way, she meets Aidan (Paul Mescal), a US soldier sickened by the cruelty around him, who finds himself equally on the run after a spur-of-the-moment decision to defend Carmen.
"It's told in a way I've never seen before," Barrera tells Digital Spy. "In a way that feels hopeful, that has beauty in it. And for a character that's an immigrant woman, you know, crossing a border – I was very excited to do something that felt so out of the box."
There are certainly traces of Bizet's 1875 opera here, alongside its source, Prosper Mérimée's novella of the same name. But Millepied has discarded the traditional image of Carmen as the temptress – who leads righteous men into madness and murder – and found instead a more heroic sense of passion, independence, innocence, and confidence.
"There's this contradiction within her. She's carrying all this trauma, but, at the same time, she's floating through life," the actor explains.
"I think that's why her being a dancer is so perfect. She's not even touching the ground. She conserves that kind of magic that I think, as we grow up, we lose. That's what I wanted to infuse in my Carmen.
"It dawned on me that, okay, people are going to come and see this movie, and they're going to think they're watching a pretty straightforward adaptation of what they know. And then they're going to be surprised."
Millepied comes primarily from the world of ballet – he danced in the New York City Ballet from 1995 to 2011, and choreographed the film Black Swan (where he met his now-spouse, Natalie Portman). But his Carmen pirouettes across the entire spectrum of movement.
Barrera wouldn't call herself a dancer, per se, but she took several courses in the basics (eg tap and modern) while at Tisch, and worked with salsa and other Latin styles in In the Heights. For Carmen, she took an extensive course in flamenco, which "made my head explode, this is the hardest thing I’ve ever done".
She also worked extensively with her director to find a style of movement that not only came naturally to the actor, but to her character's own intuitive relationship with dance. "Her mother is a flamenco dancer," the actor says. "But Carmen has her own language."
Aidan, too, has his own language. He's not a dancer, but a military man. And yet his curiosity slowly opens him up to the poetry inside his own body. When Mescal was first cast, Barrera had already seen his breakout role in Normal People.
"He had posted a few videos of himself singing back when he was on social media," she adds. "And I was like, well, he can sing. He can probably dance. He's musical, you know? And he's such a good actor that I was, like, he's probably one of those people that's just good at everything."
She was right. Though Mescal, as she explains, primarily draws his physicality from his years playing Gaelic football, "He can be graceful".
"When we started the dance rehearsals," she adds. "We were both feeling very self-conscious and worried about looking like idiots. And so we were cheering each other on and drilling these choreographies until they felt like they just came so naturally to us that we didn't have to think about it."
Barrera had, in fact, already started early rehearsals on Carmen while she was in the midst of shooting Scream. Carmen and Sam Carpenter are worlds apart and, yet – the dissonance hardly bothered her. She was too happy to care.
When the pandemic first began, it brought news that In the Heights, and what would come to be her breakout role, had been indefinitely postponed. Its future (and, in fact, the future of most things) was left uncertain.
"You go to your darkest place," Barrera says. "I was so depressed and sad. I was, like, am I ever going to work again? Am I ever going to be in LA again? And then Scream came. I got to go back to work. I'm with this franchise. I got to work with actors that I've admired for so long.
"And then knowing that I was going to go straight to shoot another movie that was finally happening. I asked the production, where can I rehearse? And they literally lent me a soundstage. So every Saturday and Sunday, I would just go in and dance. And then I would shoot Monday through Friday, I was living the dream. I was so happy."
Carmen is out now in UK cinemas.
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