Grace Caroline Curry Shares The Emotional And Physical Challenges Of Fall - Exclusive
Grace Caroline Currey is currently starring in the new nail-biting thriller "Fall." In the film, Becky (played by Currey) goes on a climbing trip with her close friend Hunter (Virginia Gardner), but after part of the tower they're climbing breaks, the pair are trapped in the middle of the desert on a disused radio tower 2,000 feet up. The friends have to fight to survive with limited supplies, no service to call for help, and harsh desert elements.
During an exclusive interview with The List, Currey described the challenges, both emotional and physical, of playing Becky. "Oftentimes, it's days of it back to back, where basically you're going to the gym and crying every day and not just crying once, but crying for multiple takes and oftentimes crying my guts out," she said. During her conversation with The List, Currey opened up about the biggest obstacles while shooting as well as how she overcame them to make the story and her character feel real.
Connecting to Becky's emotional state
Throughout the film, Grace Caroline Currey's character, Becky, endures trauma and many extreme circumstances. As an actress, Currey had to access that emotion. But she also wanted to be careful in how it came across, so it didn't seem like Becky was "whining." She said if she wasn't careful, "It could have just been Grace crying up there."
Currey explained that it was challenging because so much of the story takes place in one location — at the top of the radio tower. "Mentally, I didn't have the ability to associate the scenes with different locations and, therefore, my emotions with different locations. I only had one location," she said. But she didn't want the character to be flat just because she was stuck in one place, and despite filming out of order, she still needed to follow Becky's emotional progression.
"It was a little bit of mental gymnastics to place myself in each scene and place Becky where she was emotionally, where she is energy-wise, and physically, what she's been through," Currey said. To keep everything cohesive as they were filming, she created a map of "where [she] was per scene so that when we were filming out of order, I could know," Currey explained. "It was a lot of mental gymnastics and very exhausting but very rewarding."
The physical challenges of filming Fall
Along with the powerful emotions she had to portray, Grace Caroline Currey was also filming in a harsh location, and she had a lot of stunt work. When she was first cast in "Fall," it was at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, so she didn't have a lot of time for training ahead of shooting, and she learned most of her stunts on the job. Fortunately, she explained that they built up to the more difficult stunts over time. "[It was a] gradual progression of doing one small stunt and then the next day, the stunt being a little bigger and going, 'Oh yeah, I'm game. I'll try that,'" Currey said.
They were also filming on a tower in the middle of the desert, which made everything more challenging. "We were so high up on the tower, and I had to have a stunt harness on at all times to be safe because we were not going to have actors falling, dying while shooting this thing," she said.
Because of their location and the harness, it was difficult to take breaks and leave the tower frequently. "We were out in the desert, in the sun for hours, with a little pulley system to get us water," Currey said. "It was crazy." Despite the many challenges, Currey felt the film was entirely worth it.
"Fall" starring Grace Caroline Currey is currently in theaters.