Kaitlyn Dever interview: ‘No One Will Save You’
SPOILER ALERT: This article and video contain spoilers for this TV movie.
“It was an actor’s dream,” declares Emmy nominee Kaitlyn Dever (“Dopesick”) about her latest boundary-pushing leading role in the alien invasion thriller “No One Will Save You.” For our recent webchat about the challenges of bringing a character to life with almost no dialogue throughout the film, Dever adds, “I hadn’t done something like it before and it did make me a little bit nervous before doing it. But ultimately, it’s my favorite thing to watch as a moviegoer; silent scenes where you could go for three minutes where no one talks. I’ve always been so fascinated by stuff like that. So, to get to do it for an entire movie was just a dream come true, it really was.” Watch our exclusive video interview above.
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“No One Will Save You” was written, directed and produced by Brian Duffield, in which Dever stars as Brynn, an anxiety-ridden social outcast living alone in her childhood home on the outskirts of a small town. Brynn awakens one night to fight off an alien who’s found its way into her home, and soon discovers that the entire town has been overrun by the creepy extraterrestrials. The Hulu sci-fi thriller remarkably only features five words of dialogue spoken during its entire runtime, relying on its impressive visuals and sound design and Dever’s compelling performance as a terrified woman confronting the malevolent alien threat surrounding her home and the emotional trauma and grief tormenting her from within. “The no dialogue aspect of it does free you up to go wherever you want to, in your mind, and I would even, for a lot of scenes, I would say things in my head and then hope that that phrase came through in my facial expression,” Dever explains. “I never felt like restrained. I never felt like I want to say something, but I can’t. That was Brian’s number one thing. He was like, ‘look, I really don’t want to force this in any sort of way.’ I even remember getting 20 pages, 30 pages into the script, and because I was so in the story, I didn’t even realize,” she says.
Months after the film’s premiere, genre fans (including the likes of Oscar-winning filmmaker Guillermo del Toro and legendary horror author Stephen King) are still debating the true meaning behind the film’s audaciously ambiguous ending. Dever says she prefers to leave it up to the audience to decide, but admits that she has her own thoughts about the meaning behind the film’s final moments. “There are certain things that I wanted to keep as a mystery to me, because Brynn is figuring all of this out as she goes. I wanted to keep the mystery there, just for my own headspace and the performance. But I’ve read the theories. What’s so cool about making a movie like this is the reaction that the movie had after the release. It’s so cool to make stuff like this, because it really gets people talking about it and sharing their thoughts,” she says.
The actress adds, “She gets to live out the fantasy that she always wanted, and the fantasy that she lived with by herself, but just out in the town now. At the core of the story, for me, I was mainly focused on her struggle and her arc throughout, defeating the aliens, and that she starts off as this very scared, confused, terrified person that then finds her way through and says, ‘you know what, I’m going to get these guys. I don’t know what they’re doing, or why they’re here,’ but she makes a choice and makes a decision which is really a nice moment for her in the film,” she explains. “We all worked so hard to make all of these specific choices for the character and the story. It is just so beautiful to see something like that come to life, and then for people to watch it and then love it, and then talk about it in the way that they have been has been really wonderful. I feel very grateful to be a part of it.”
