The First Omen is being released in theaters next week, and the film stars Servant‘s Nell Tiger Free as a young American woman who is sent to Italy to begin a life of service to the church. However, things take a dark turn when she starts to uncover an evil conspiracy. ComicBook.com recently spoke with producer Keith Levine, and we brought up how great Free is in the film, and wondered if he was involved with her casting.
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“100%. Yeah,” Levine shared. “She’s incredible onscreen and offscreen, just like the best possible human being, incredible to work with. Obviously, she carries the movie on her shoulders, and yeah, we couldn’t have found a better person, I think, to play Margaret.”
“Back to casting. It’s interesting, especially when you’re dealing with a franchise, you’re dealing with a studio,” he continued. “I think sometimes different levels of pressure for casting, sometimes you need a big name to put above the title. Sometimes you have a franchise where you get to … just find a great actor. And that’s how we saw Nell. We were all big fans of hers, having seen her work in Servant and in some other stuff. And I think we fell in love with her as the character. And we also love that she had done [M. Night Shyamalan’s] show on Apple, but she hadn’t kind of been in a big genre movie yet on screen. And that was also exciting to us.”
“She felt like she had a little bit of genre cred, but also wasn’t like, … ‘Oh, I know her, and I like her. I’ve seen Servant,’ but they haven’t really seen her flex muscles beyond that. And I think what’s so cool about our movie is she gets to do everything. She starts off and she’s sort of this quiet young woman arriving in Rome, and when you find her at the end, she’s been through some sh*t and she’s a little badass, but also experienced a lot of dark stuff.”
“So it is a certain, I think, skillset that is able to handle material like that. And Nell took it and just exceeded everybody’s expectations, but we all believed in her so much to begin with, so we couldn’t be happier with her.”
“I mean, again, if you had to give the award out for ‘Most Outstanding’ … it was her and she’s on set every day. She’s basically in every scene of the movie.”
ComicBook.com also spoke with director Arkasha Stevenson, who was quick to praise Free.
“No, it was a dream,” Stevenson said of directing Free. “And I joke with her that she makes directors lazy, just so good, and has such great instincts … It was so nice to have a partner on this film. And she does a lot of heavy – this is a big boulder for her to carry. She’s in every scene just about, she’s on set every single day. It’s extremely physical as well as mentally taxing. And she was able to do those peaks and valleys so seamlessly and effortlessly that she was able to be present as a collaborator, which was wonderful.
You can watch our interviews with The First Omen creatives at the top of the page. The movie lands exclusively in theaters on April 5th.
