You may know Karen Gillan best from hits like Guardians of the Galaxy and Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. And now, add “intellectually brilliant femme fatale” to the stunning Scottish star’s ever-expanding list of film roles. With Sleeping Dogs, she also has the added benefit of sharing some of the film’s best scenes with a certain multiple-Oscar-winner by the name of Russell Crowe. Here he plays a former detective suffering from dementia, as he finds himself returning to an old case that ultimately becomes entangled with an elusive intellectual played by Gillan, who once again pulls off an impeccable American accent.
We recently caught up with her to learn more about what it’s like working with Crowe, her love for the Jumanji franchise, and her excitement that Hollywood is turning a disastrous Willy Wonka experience into a feature film (she’s down to play a “cheeky Oompa Loompa”).
Karen Gillan Plays “Emotional Tennis” With Russell Crowe
Russell Crowe is on a short list of actors who have won back-to-back Academy Awards, and as Gillan confirmed with us, he is still a force to be reckoned with. “It was so cool working with him. I mean, he’s just such a brilliant actor,” she said. “I feel like I learned a lot from just watching him. He’s incredibly in control of every little micro-expression on his face. And he’s very aware of filmmaking as a whole, rather than just the acting part. And so he was very involved technically on set, which was quite interesting to see. But yeah, I loved working with him. It was so cool to get to be in a scene locked into each other with all the power play.”
Gillan continued to detail a pivotal moment in Sleeping Dogs, where her mysterious character is being grilled by Crowe’s detective about a long-lost murder that was supposedly solved — until it wasn’t:
“I have this big scene with Russell Crowe, where we’re sort of sitting opposite each other at a table. And there’s lots of power play, and
it feels like a game of emotional tennis or something
. And that was just really cool because I’m like, ‘Wow, I can’t believe I’m sitting here doing this with Russell Crowe.’
And also, it was nerve-racking. And yeah, it’s good to kind of walk through the fire and do the things that scare you
. I am so happy I did that.”
Gillan’s character Laura is a student of sorts, and Gillan shared some of the other perks of working on Sleeping Dogs. “I enjoyed having to learn — I mean, I only had to learn one line for each — but I had to speak five different languages,” she said. “That was fun to sort of learn Mandarin and things like that… I’ve got a lot of random skills, like nunchucks [from Jumanji] and one line of dialogue in Mandarin.”
As Laura, Gillan is playing more than just a femme fatale-type figure in a twisted love story. It’s a unique role that becomes more layered as we learn more about Laura. “I did a deep dive into certain personality types. For this character, I kind of figured she was the type of person that would be sort of watching a lot of footage of people that she deemed to be intellectuals, and then sort of taking on their mannerisms and their way of speaking and communicating,” Gillan told MovieWeb, adding:
So I kind of wanted her to feel slightly performative as a person. But then that was quite scary for me to pitch because I’m like, ‘This is so easily going to look like bad acting, and it quite possibly does.’ But the idea behind it was that she is performing in her everyday life, all the time.
Reminiscing On Nebula and Guardians of the Galaxy
Gillan fans perhaps know her better from an entirely different movie — a franchise, rather, known as Guardians of the Galaxy, and many would say her superhero persona there is a fan-favorite. Gillan told us:
“Nebula, I love that character because, for me, I get to explore what it’s like to be a good sibling
within a family dynamic
, where there’s a golden child and then the child that’s never good enough and never as good as the other one. And that is so awful to be at the receiving end of. I’m an only child, so I wasn’t, but I know people that were, and it’s just absolutely devastating to a person’s life. So I got to explore all of that through Nebula, which was fascinating to me.”
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Gillan has also been in the news as of late after a real-life Willy Wonka experience in her native Scotland made headlines for being utterly disastrous for guests. Some even compared it to the catastrophic Fyre Fest from several years back. There was one perk to the Wonka event, however, as it created (from scratch) a villain’s persona known only as The Unknown. And now, there is talk of a feature film to made about it.
“Give me The Unknown spin-off immediately!” Gillan told MovieWeb. “I would take any role, to be honest. And it’s in Scotland, so I can play almost any of them. But yeah, I would be the Oompa Loompa or The Unknown. I would be very happy with either of those.”
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Despite her Scottish roots, Gillan consistently pulls off a flawless American accent. “The first film that I did in an American accent was this film called Oculus, which is a horror film by Mike Flanagan,” she said. “I had a 10-minute monologue that I had to do all in one take, which you wouldn’t know from watching it because it’s edited. But in real life, I did it all together. I feel like I must have covered most of the words in the dictionary in the American accent, in just that monologue alone. So it was good training for me.”
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Fans of Gillan also know her as one of the four stars of the rebooted Jumanji franchise. “I definitely want to continue the Jumanji movies,” she told us. “They’re so much fun, and I think I relate to that character in the sense of still feeling like a nerdy teenage girl who’s trapped in the body of someone that does a lot of action stuff. So I’m like, ‘Oh, this is a perfect representation.'”
Looking ahead, we were curious if there’s a particular realm of cinema she’d like to tackle more of down the line. “I think maybe just some drama, straight drama that’s not genre-based, even though I love genre stuff,” she said. “It’s also what I thought I was going to do when I started, so it’d be nice to kind of see that through.”
But for now, from The Avenue, Sleeping Dogs hits theaters Friday. Watch the trailer below:
