Olivia Colman “didn’t like to talk” to her director Maggie Gyllenhaal on the set of their Netflix film The Lost Daughter.
The motherhood drama – which also stars Dakota Johnson and Jessie Buckley – marks Gyllenhaal’s filmmaking debut, and sees Colman portray a haunted professor whose traumas resurface while on holiday.
In a new interview, Gyllenhaal confessed that she didn’t interact much with Colman on the set of the film, and wondered whether the British actor assumed her ideas wouldn’t be “valued”.
“Olivia really didn’t like to talk about much,” Gyllenhaal told The New York Times. “I wonder, actually, if it’s because it was relatively recently that she got power as an actress, if she feels similarly to the way I feel as an actress, which is it’s very rare that somebody values my ideas.
“They will say they do, but people are irritated by actresses with a lot of ideas. I’m not an idiot, and so I mostly keep them to myself. I remember asking Olivia if she likes to rehearse, and she said, I don’t, actually, and I totally relate to that.”
The Lost Daughter marks the latest starring role for Colman in an American film, following her surprise Oscar win in 2019 for The Favourite. The film is adapted from a novel by Elena Ferrante.
Colman recently joked that she improvised a flirtatious scene with her co-star Paul Mescal, who shot to fame in Normal People.
The Lost Daughter, which The Independent called “rich and luxurious” in its review of the film, launches on Netflix today (31 December).