Written by
Johanna Cox and photographed by
Jamie Siegel: for
Elle.com:
For her 27th birthday, British model cum actress Agyness Deyn is getting a pretty cool gift: the premiere of her first film, Mean to Me. Directed by multi-media artist Peter McGough, and co-starring Law & Order’s Linus Roache, Mean to Me is a Manhattan-set 1930s noir art short about a courtesan (Deyn) and her newly fortuneless lover (Roache) as they come face to face with the stark, unanticipated reality of the Great Depression. “He’s forced to break up with her,” McGough (who co-wrote the script with longtime collaborator David McDermott) says of Roache’s character. “And he’s very straightforward, very practical when he tells his lover he’s marrying someone else to keep his finances going. From there, it gets darker.” Though just over 20 minutes in length, Mean To Me—whose name comes from the 1929 Ruth Etting
song—is dialogue-rich, close-up heavy, and an ambitious first film for Deyn. “I love working with visionaries,” she says. “Peter is incredibly talented, and to work with him was freeing—he was very patient but direct with me.” And her co-star? Was working alongside someone with decades of TV, film, and stage experience helpful or intimidating? “Working with Linus was a pleasure!” the once-platinum, now raven-haired Deyn says. “The first time we met, I felt instantly relaxed. We chatted—he was so encouraging of me—and we connected on our beliefs on life and work, which probably has something to do with [the fact that] we’re both from the same tiny village north of Manchester!”
Roache offered similar praise of Deyn, calling her “a natural,” her performance “full of emotional depth,” and concluding that “if she wants it, she has a great movie career ahead of her.”
Though Deyn seems eager to leave fashion as a full-time job behind, Mean to Me has an indelible high-fashion mark, thanks to the film’s exclusively Zac Posen wardrobe. “I’ve known Zac since he was 12 years old,” McGough says. “At his first runway show, he was wearing my borrowed Bunny Rogers dress suit—with tails!” That friendship turned out to be fortuitous, as the designer granted the first-time director full-access to his RTW archives. “We did a screen test for the costumes, scoured Zac’s collections, and really, I was so naïve—I thought it would be easy!” McGough recalls. Because both he and the film’s art director, Robert Bryan (the former men’s fashion director at The New York Times), are both self-described “perfectionists” when it comes to maintaining era-specific authenticity, however, nothing—not the hairstyles, not the photographs in the picture frames, not the way Deyn lit her cigarettes, and certainly not the costuming—was easy. “Robert would look at a rack of Zac’s clothing,” McGough recalls, “And he would say, ‘That’s a ’39, those are more ’36, these are ’32 or ’33,’ so even if something looked great on film, we couldn’t use it if it wasn’t consistent with everything else in the shot.”
From the set’s décor (which, fortunately, didn’t take much effort to build—the three-day shoot was on location at McGough’s already ’30s-authentic West Village apartment) to Deyn’s vintage Mikimoto pearl studs and Guerlain Shalimar perfume, Mean to Me is a meticulously helmed, visually stunning production both McGough and Deyn should be proud to have as their first foray into scripted film.
Mean to Me premieres in New York City tonight, February 19th, opens next week in a limited engagement at
Cheim & Read Gallery, and will be shown later this spring at Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna.
Each of the three mornings of the Mean to Me shoot, Deyn sat in the makeup chair with renowned makeup artist Nick Barose. In keeping with the director’s careful attention to maintaining the authentic ’30s detail, Barose gave the actress a simple, black liquid-lined eye and classic crimson lip—Guerlain’s Rouge G lipstick in “Gala” (#21), to be specific.
Deyn takes a glamorous script study break on set.
Director Peter McGough says of his first-time actress: “[Agyness] is a quiet person—but still waters run deep with her. She took direction incredibly well, took the role very seriously…she has a real talent for this.”
Stylist Giannandrea touches up Deyn’s hair in between scenes. “We tried several styles before settling on this one,” he says. “In the test shots, Peter and [Art Director] Robert [Bryan] decided the style wasn’t era-specific enough, so we went back into the chair and played around with the shape, the curls, the pins, until we got it just right.” How long did it take the veteran stylist to get Deyn camera-ready each morning? “Almost two hours,” he says. “She was very patient!”
A lover of all things 1930s himself (that’s his apartment, furnished almost exclusively in the era’s décor), the director shows his leading lady, down to the finger flick, how a woman would’ve lit her cigarette 80 years ago.
In the final scene, Deyn’s co-star, Law & Order’s Linus Roache, was bound in a bathtub—a situation that led to what the actor says was one of the funnier on-set moments: “We broke for lunch in the middle of that scene,” he recalls. “After we’d finished, I’m standing in a bath full of water and Peter is tying and re-tying, trying to remember how he tied me up before we ate!”
