A last-minute addition to Contenders London to promote Apple Original Film’s F1, Irish actress Kerry Condon rocked the house with her memories of shooting Joseph Kosinski‘s racing drama, set in the macho world of Formula One. Playing technician Kate McKenna to Pitt’s maverick driver Sonny Hayes, Condon offsets the male bias as a woman who can more than handle herself in a man’s world, a challenge she was willing to embrace. “I can change a tire, I’m a great driver,” she said. “Honestly, though, physics and maths were my worst subjects in school. So when I was learning about it, I did have my limits with those aspects of it. It’s very technical and it’s not something I’d be good at in real life.”
The part also required Condon to square up against Pitt and tell him a brutal home truth: “Sonny Hayes isn’t a has-been, he’s a never-was.”
Condon laughed when reminded of the scene. “That was very early on in the shoot” she recalled. “We’d shot at Silverstone [race track], and it was a big high. Everyone went out, but I was like, ‘I’m not going out. I’ve got that big scene with Brad on Tuesday. There’s no way I’m hitting the town.’ So I laid low, because I knew I had that scene coming up, and it was a really big scene, and I wanted to prove why I got the job. The biggest thing for me in that scene was when I pick up the pint, I was like, ‘Don’t shake the pint! Don’t shake the pint!’ That would give away the fact at I was nervous. I was like, ‘Just pick it up!’”
The shaky pint, however, proved not to be the problem. “Joe said, the more takes we did, the meaner I got, which I was surprised by. I was like, “I don’t think I was that mean to him!’ And so a lot of the cut that you see was the first take. The actor’s strike started the next day, so a part of me was like, ‘I could get recast if I don’t do this good.’ Stranger things have happened.”
Condon also revealed that the film’s main action scenes were filmed almost on the fly at real racing events around the world. “I felt like we were a guest of Formula One, and we were a film crew infiltrating their actual job,” she said. “Joe did tell me when I got the job, ‘Your theater background will help, because there’s a live aspect to this. You couldn’t be like, ‘Can I go to my trailer? I just want to brush my teeth.’ It was like, ‘You’ve got to be ready. There’s nobody waiting for you.’ I kind of loved the non-princessy vibe, because it was like, ‘We can’t be thinking about that. We haven’t time.’”
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