Kyle Allen Opens Up About Filming The In Between - Exclusive Interview
If there's one thing we easily fall for, it's an amazing love story. This season's newest supernatural romance, "The In Between," delivers exactly that.
The film follows a teenager named Tessa (played by Joey King), who has always felt as though she doesn't deserve a happy ending. However, when she falls hard for a boy named Skylar, everything suddenly seems to make sense — until their romance quickly comes to an end when he is killed in a car crash. As Tessa begins to search for new meaning in her life, she's met with a series of mysterious messages instead. She believes it's her boyfriend communicating with her from the afterlife, AKA "The In Between," giving her hope that there really could be a happy ending in store for her after all.
The touching film takes a toll on anyone watching. In fact, if we're really being honest, we cried throughout the entire thing — and we weren't the only ones. Actor Kyle Allen, who plays Skylar, had to prepare himself for many sad scenes and even had to shed his own tears on screen.
We sat down with the actor to ask him all about the emotional experience. In an exclusive interview with The List, Allen explained how he prepared to cry on camera, revealed the special person who inspired his character, and opened up about his favorite kind of love stories.
Here's how Kyle Allen prepared to play Skylar in The In Between
How did you prepare for the role of Skylar, and how did you go about building a relationship with Joey King's character Tessa?
I read the script over and over again. We had a lot of meetings with our director [Arie Posin, about] how he saw the character and what he wanted to bring to it.
What's great on a film set is you have all these different artists and you have all these different people and they all have visions, because we've all read the script before seeing what the characters actually are and how the performance is actually going to go. I'd really fed off of them. What's the costume like? What do you see as the character? What does the makeup artist think?
I'm also rowing three times a week at seven in the morning for a few hours. Learning about that, I was like, "Well, if this is a thing that my character does, I could probably learn a lot from my instructors and the other rowers that I'm paired with and results of my character." So I approached it that way.
Immediately after reading, I felt like the character had a lot of similarities with my own ... it had a lot of similarities to my own father. I tried to put a bit of him in there as well.
Kyle Allen shares what it was like working with Joey King
There's a scene towards the end of the movie where you're crying actual tears and having to be emotional on camera. What is a day on set like for something like that, and is that the most difficult scene that you had to do?
No, no. I think the technically complicated things at three in the morning with the emotions, I think that's more challenging.
Often, for scenes like that, everyone's really open and easy on that day, but really the bigger of a deal you make of it, the more difficult that scene's going to be, because you're going to create boundaries.
Relying on [my] scene partner, Joey King, who's absolutely phenomenal. We'll be laughing and making fart jokes [Laughs], and then straight into that scene — straight into that scene, crying.
It was — that scene in particular is so beautiful. It's so honest. It's so devastating and profound and lovely and all those things. It really — it was all there already, and so you have to let it be there.
These are this West Side Story star's favorite kind of endings
The running theme in "The In Between" is the impact of happy endings versus unhappy endings. Which do you prefer in a love story?
I think I prefer honest endings, which is why I like this — because it's both. It's happy, and it's sad, which are ... when things end or things continue, you're always saying goodbye to something, but you're also embracing what's to come. I feel like that's in the film, and I think those are my favorite.
You recently also did "West Side Story," which is another love story. Are you drawn to these types of stories? What are you looking for in a script?
[Laughs] I guess so. I feel like in one way or another, every story's a love story. It's who we are.
"The In Between" is available to stream Friday, February 11, exclusively on Paramount+.