The upcoming action-thriller Onslaught has made no secret of the fact that the character played by its star, Andor‘s Adria Arjona, loses an eye at some point in the film. It’s in the trailer, it’s in most of the photos released for the film, and it’s even on the poster. For director Adam Wingard, this was certainly a wink at an iconic cinematic icon in Kurt Russell’s Snake Plissken, continuing his trend of Easter eggs referencing the oeuvre of John Carpenter. Though the influence is clear, Celeste is her own kind of character in the film and not a direct copt.
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For Arjona, though, doing major stunts in the film while using only one eye proved an interesting challenge. Speaking with ComicBook in an interview about the film, she confirmed that her stunt training began using both eyes, and eventually they introduced an eye patch to the training, which made things harder.
“For this movie, there was a lot of tactical training,” Arjona said. “We did a lot of physical training, but most of it was tactical work, a lot of stunt work. And then, as we started training and I was getting more comfortable with machinery, then we incorporated the eyepatch and then we realized really quickly that it gives you very bad vertigo. So then we would have to switch up the eyes to sort of train the eye. When we were filming, it never really was a big problem, maybe until after I finished the movie. I was like, oh sh-t, yeah, I’m a little bit more blind in one eye for sure.”
Wingard went on to confirm that the first days on set, where Arjona had to wear the eyepatch, also came with a new set of problems; they were filming in confined spaces. Onslaught filmed in actual trailers for some of its scenes, not just sets on a soundstage, meaning that a lot of people got squeezed into a small space and there was an actress present with no depth perception anymore.
“I remember there was this sort of learning curve where crew, everybody’s rushing around…you never had enough space. And people had to kind of start learning, Adria can’t see out of one of her eyes,” Wingard added.
“I got hit with, like, a battery pack, I think. But it was a complete accident,” the actress revealed. “Because if you see somebody passing, move away. There’s, again, a confined space, a real trailer. Everything’s small. You would move away. But because there’s so much equipment, I lost all peripheral vision…We learned some big lessons the first week. I looked like a drunk person just walking to my trailer after (filming).”
Onslaught arrives in theaters this Friday, September 4th.
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Image courtesy of Tri-Star Pictures
