After A Quiet Place and its sequel established a world where humans are being killed by noise-sensitive creatures and must stay silent to stay alive, A Quiet Place: Day One takes audiences back to the beginning of the alien invasion.
Lupita Nyong’o and Joseph Quinn star in the prequel, with John Krasinski — who wrote and directed the first two — on board as producer. At the film’s NYC premiere on Wednesday, the pair explained what it was like to do a film with so little dialogue, relying moreso on their facial expressions and physical movements.
“As human beings we’re always communicating with more than our words, so for us as actors, when we’re reading a script we’re always looking for what’s happening between the lines. Then you get rid of the dialogue and all you have is what’s between the lines, and there’s a certain kind of liberty that comes with that,” Nyong’o told The Hollywood Reporter. “It’s liberating to not have to speak and to explore a character in that sort of primal, immediate way. And then when you have a scene partner as great as Joe Quinn to go on the journey with, it’s so fruitful because it’s spontaneous, it’s fresh, it’s exciting and it’s dangerous — you don’t know what’s going to happen in the scene.”
For his part, Quinn added that because of the lack of dialogue, “it was about listening to what Lupita was doing or my scene partner was doing in front of me and we all built it together, slowly but surely.”
The actor, who played Eddie Munson in the fourth season of Stranger Things, added that when doing the Netflix show, “You learn how to run from invisible things. I guess I applied that skill set that I learned there, here.”
Nyong’o also spoke on the carpet about undergoing cat therapy ahead of filming, as she had an extreme fear of felines and her character has a cat with her for much of movie.
“What the cat therapy took was just exposure to the cat, and having that exposure with someone who could break down cat behavior to me in a way that made sense and was patient enough. I think it was that, being patient enough to ask the questions, hear the answers and gain confidence in the fact that this cat was not going to scratch me or eat me,” the star explained. “And it took some time but by the time I was in U.K. to start filming this movie, I had more confidence and by the end of it I was madly in love with the cats and I got myself one.”
A Quiet Place: Day One, co-starring Alex Wolff and Djimon Hounsou and directed by Michael Sarnoski, hits theaters Friday.
Neha Joy contributed to this report.