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With the characters created from the raw material of the songs, the filmmakers placed an imperative on choosing the best actors and singers they could find for the roles.
As a result, the only cast member with major film experience is Evan Rachel Wood. Taymor notes, “She’s so young and nobody really has seen her grow into a woman – in this movie, she grows into a full-fledged adult, serious woman. She’s going to be a major discovery for people. Plus, no one even knew she could sing.”
Among all the songs she sings in Across the Universe, the one she looked forward to most as the greatest challenge was “If I Fell.” “I’ve never had any training in singing, and that song goes very, very high. It’s also the most emotional song I sing. So I had to prepare myself emotionally for the character at that moment and also put it into song – while also remembering what my voice had to do,” says Wood. “As I was learning the song and trying to figure out how to sing it, they brought Jim Sturgess into the room so I could sing it to him. It was the very best I ever sang it – it took my mind off what I was doing and freed me up.”
Wood notes that she shared not only a connection with Sturgess, but with the entire cast – and that it was reciprocal. “Julie knows how to cast a movie,” she says, “and she knew that we would work well together because we’re all very similar. During production, I’d felt like I’d gained brothers and sisters; they’re all such interesting people and they all have great life stories.”
Open casting calls were held in England for the role of Jude. Taymor said she could tell from a tape of Jim Sturgess that he was the one, even before she met him in person.
Taymor and her longtime collaborator, composer Elliot Goldenthal, were very particular about what kind of voices they wanted, she explains. “We did not want musical theater voices, and we didn’t want pop-y voices. Jim just fit in right away. Jim’s been in a rock band and he’s an actor. He just sings with such an incredible ease that you feel that the character is talking just to you. He has a beautiful voice – and there’s no disconnect between when his speaking voice and his singing voice. Jim can go right from talking to singing.”
Sturgess says that he is fortunate to be making his major-studio debut in Across the Universe and to be working with no less a talent than Julie Taymor. “She’s brilliant,” he says. “She’s an endless head of ideas. She has a definite idea of what she wants to see, but also allows her actors the room to bring their own ideas – she just takes it all in.”
Working with the stars playing the cameo roles in the film was also an eye-opening experience. “One day, I was sitting around, watching Bono sing ‘I am the Walrus’ – so I was already having a good afternoon – and then he comes over and asks me if I’d like to come to his show at the end of the week. What was I going to say? ‘Sorry, I have other plans?’ No, I stood there and said, ‘I’d love to, thank you… Mr. Bono.” Another highlight for Sturgess was the day Bono came to set and told the young actor that he liked Sturgess’s voice.
Max is an American, but Taymor did not find an American actor that had the qualities she wanted for the part. When she met Joe Anderson, another Brit, she found it interesting that he did not even want to audition for the role of Jude: “When I went to London he auditioned for me, but he said, you know, “I’m not that character – I am Max,” so even he knew that his own personality would be better suited to that. And he looked like Evan, so he was really the right mix to play her brother.”
For Sadie, says Taymor, “I knew Dana Fuchs and I created the part for her. Dana had done a demo for Elliot for another project, and she has that voice that you haven’t heard since Janis.”
Fuchs says, “I felt like I was in a movie when I was on the phone with Julie and she was telling me that I got the part. There was no one there to witness. I was shocked – on top of getting the part, to find out she wrote it for me was amazing. She said there was no other Sadie.”
Sadie’s partner in the movie is the character of Jo-Jo, who is also a musician. “He comes from Detroit, comes from soul music, and hooks up with these young strays and he becomes part of Sadie’s band. He transforms in front of you, going from the slicked-back hair to the wild afro.” To play Jo-Jo, Taymor called upon Martin Luther McCoy, a singer and a guitar player in New York without much acting experience. Taymor says that he proved himself to be “a phenomenal actor” as well as musician.
T.V. Carpio, who plays Prudence, was another discovery. Along with having a beautiful singing voice, T.V. is a dancer and former ice skater. “I had Prudence become a skating horse in the circus scenes because she could ice skate. Then, I thought, ‘Well, she’ll be the cheerleader, instead of just watching the cheerleader, because she’s so good physically,” says Taymor. “As you get to know the actors, you create more and more for them.”
The feeling was mutual. Carpio recalls, “As Jim said to me, in the very beginning: ‘I’m just desperate to do what Julie needs from us.’ We wanted so much to make her vision come alive. When she would tell us what she saw, it would never be just what’s written on a piece of paper – it would be something just completely out of this world… we were so honored to be a part of that. We couldn’t even believe that this is our job.”
Wood agrees. “Julie really brings out the best in you,” she says. “She can make you do things that you never knew you could do. I love how she brings that out of people. You can’t be afraid and you can’t have any fear. She throws you into the deep end and somehow you’re just in there and you swim there, and you realize, ‘I didn’t know I could do this.'”
The cast was rounded out with some very special guests in supporting roles. Bono, who was in the middle of a world tour with U2, managed to fit in two days on set as “Dr. Robert.” He played Madison Square Garden late into the night before each of his early morning calls. “We concocted the character together, me and Julie,” says the rock star, activist, and first-time actor. “She wanted him to be true to the time and period, so we made him a west coast, Neal Cassady type.” Cassady, of course, was the inspiration for Jack Kerouac’s On the Road; a key figure in the 60s counterculture, he was also an author in his own right and the driver of Furthur, Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters bus). “We studied film of him and the way he worked, and it’s almost like he wanted to be a rock star – he has all these jerky moves, a lot of self-confidence, always plays to the women in the room. For my first acting role, I thought this would be interesting and a little bit special.”
Salma Hayek, Taymor’s friend and Oscar®-nominated star of Frida, plays the sexy dancing nurses in “Happiness is a Warm Gun.” Taymor asked Hayek if she wanted to play a nurse and Hayek said she wanted to play all five of them – something that was accomplished with motion control camera work (requiring Hayek to repeat her dance number very carefully many times during two long days in order to create the illusion of five pin-up nurses). Eddie Izzard plays the role of the circus ringleader in “Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” and Joe Cocker worked in the middle of several nights to complete his multiple “Come Together” roles of singing bum, pimp, and hippie.
– credit: Press Release
