Culture.pl: You recently acted in the mystery-thriller Child 44. What was it like to play in a hit movie, besides major international stars like Tom Hardy and Gary Oldman?
Agnieszka Grochowska: I was quite surprised that it happened. In fact I didn’t act with Gary Oldman, we didn’t have a scene together unfortunately. I had two scenes with Tom Hardy, one of which has dialogues and is about 2.5 minutes long. It took 12 hours, a whole day, to film those 2.5 minutes. It was very pleasant to work with an actor of Tom Hardy's calibre on a dialogue scene for 12 hours. I often joke that my screen time in this movie adds up to about 360 seconds, which isn’t all that much, but of course working on Child 44 was wonderful.
You usually act in Polish. In Child 44 you had to play in English. Did that affect your work?
It had a fundamental effect because I don’t think in English. It’s hard to act in a foreign language, because when you are to extract certain emotions from yourself, you associate these emotions with your native language. But then again I only had about 10 lines to say, so it wasn’t that hard . The filmmakers were also very well prepared, they had a language coach. This coach could tell me, very quickly and precisely, for instance in which vowel I was making a mistake, or what was I pronouncing wrong, and that really helped me with my acting. Being coached like that, I felt as if I had to learn a song by heart.
You lived in Poland when it was still a communist state. Did your experiences with a communist country come in handy when you were making a movie about the darkest communist times in the Soviet Union?
I don’t think so, when things were changing here I was only 10 years old. Children live a sheltered life. I didn’t understand the extent of chaos in Poland in 1984, I was 7 or 5 back then. When the martial law was introduced, I was 2. I didn't find anything strange in having no toys and sewing dresses from curtains. I thought the entire world was like that.
In the Polish film Wałęsa. Man of Hope. you played Danuta Wałęsa, wife of Lech Wałęsa, the Polish leader and Nobel Prize winner, who played a key role in bringing down communism. What sort of a task was it to portray Mrs. Wałęsa, one of Poland’s historical icons?
The biggest problem was that there was almost no information about her. Nobody knows what she was doing in the 70s and 80s, there are no archival recordings, there are only scraps. Fortunately, about a week before the filming started, her autobiographical memoirs Marzenia i tajemnice / Dreams and Secrets was published. This book contains her recollections and thoughts and that helped a lot. I was quite surprised when the Wałęsas’ children and their friends reacted so positively. For instance some of the younger children of the Wałęsas’ think that I really played their mother, that I managed to convey the atmosphere that they remember from home. This had completely nothing to do with my acting skills, because I knew almost nothing about her.
You played in the Oscar-nominated film W ciemności / In Darkness, which is based on true events that occurred during World War II in German-occupied Poland. What are your recollections of working on this movie?
This was probably one of the hardest movies I played in. This film was partially made in real sewers in Łódź. It took 3 hours just to start filming in those sewers because every sound endlessly multiplies over there, nobody was able to give basic commands, to manage the hundred people that worked underground. After waiting 3 underground, everybody, including the actors and Agnieszka Holland, would go completely nuts. We knew that we'd had to stay there for many more hours, and this was a daunting prospect. The film tells the story of the people who died in there, who experienced horrible things… when you enter that world, it gets inside of you.
You received the Norwegian equivalent of an Oscar, an Amanda award, for your role in the Norwegian film Upperdog, but you didn’t show up at the 2010 ceremony in Haugesund to collect the award…
I was in Wałbrzych then, where I was filming Bez wstydu / Shameless and I couldn’t go. Unfortunately that’s the way things go sometimes. I was very happy to receive the award nevertheless. Upperdog was, by the way, a great success, it won awards for best film, screenplay and cinematography. It was a hit and did very well in cinemas. In this movie I play a comedy role, which I never do in Poland. And that’s the benefit of acting abroad, people don’t perceive you through the prism of what you’ve done.