Interview: Natalia Tena, actress

Published on Thursday 7 July 2011 16:59

"IT WAS one of the most extreme things I've ever done in my life," says Natalia Tena matter-of-factly.

The 26-year-old Harry Potter actress spent four days at T in the Park working on a guerrilla-style film shot entirely at the Balado event last year, an experience that saw her handcuffed to her co-star while battling the elements, a race against time and the small matter of 90,000 tipsy extras.

You Instead follows indie star Adam who, upon arriving at T in the Park for a gig, finds himself accidentally handcuffed to Morello, the lead singer of a punk band, played by Tena. The pair have no choice but to spend the weekend chained together, and are forced to pull off both their performances while contending with their jealous other halves.

Director David Mackenzie, of Hallam Foe and Young Adam fame, filmed the whole project at the music festival, with cast and crew camping on-site for the duration of shooting. The film, which is due out in September, premiered at this year's Glasgow Film Festival and a special screening was shown on-site at T in the Park - taking place this weekend - on Thursday.

Tena - who fronts the unsigned band Molotov Jukebox - spent the weekend in a flimsy costume in bad weather with thousands of fans crashing the shots. The cast and crew had to get every frame they needed before the festival drew to a close, and since they spent the long weekend in conditions to many other festival-goers - in the same clothes, without showers and with variable access to toilets - the mud, sweat and tears are all real.

"It was such a massive experience in my life," says Tena. "It was huge. Continuity went out the window, all the normal ways of doing things on a film set were thrown out, which allowed for such freedom of expression. It evolved for us as the weekend went on, which is so different to the experience of waiting in a trailer for ten hours for one tiny scene."

While You Instead was scripted, around 50 per cent of what made the final cut was improvised, with the actors working with the enormous set to bring new ideas into the mix. In one scene, Adam and Morello are desperate for a pair of bolt-cutters to solve the handcuffs problem. Tena came up with the idea of running on to the main stage and asking the whole audience if anyone had some they could borrow. So that's what they did.

"The Proclaimers were about to come on so absolutely everyone at T in the Park was watching this stage," she says with a laugh.

"What was funny was that because our faces went on to this giant screen, after we filmed that scene, everyone recognised us and people did start to approach us for that reason, which worked well because we play characters who are supposed to be famous musicians."

For Tena, playing a rock star at a music festival combined perfectly her love of acting and music. As the lead singer of Molotov Jukebox, she has performed at a number of festivals in the UK and internationally, including Glastonbury, and she has her eye on King Tut's tent at T in the Park."I'm working on it," she insists. "Filming You Instead was my first time at T in the Park, and it was amazing. To be told I get to play a rock star, it's like 'are you kidding me?' This is perfect'. I've done other characters where I've thought 'how am I going to find this woman?' But this one was completely easy. I've always loved projects where I can combine acting and music. That thing of more than one element, it's almost necessary in life. If I just did music I might go insane. I need words, I need stories. And it's the same the other way around."

The cast began filming on the Thursday night when the festival is just beginning to kick off, shooting a stage-diving scene, but the rest of the filming was almost entirely linear, an unusual experience for a film actor.

In the final scene they shot, Tena's character has just been dumped, and the backdrop is the remnants of the festival as it draws to a close; litter, a barren field and thousands upon thousands of seagulls.

"The scene looks like the end of the world," says Tena. "It was six in the morning, I was tired and freezing, there was this amazing sunrise and it felt very intense. It was the last scene and I just didn't think I was going to be able to cry. The physicality of being freezing, it felt like there was nothing left in me, but then it suddenly happened, this moment, crying, then laughing through tears."

Despite the mud and the warm beer, the portable toilets and the drunken revellers, Tena has just one complaint about the experience. "The weather," she says flatly. "It was my fault, I chose this tiny costume. But the reason I chose it is that every time I've gone to Glasgow, and I've been there a lot, it's always been hot and sunny. I'm like 'wicked, what's everyone talking about Scotland being cold?' But. It. Was. Freezing."

In short, the experience couldn't have been more different from her time working on Harry Potter. She plays Nymphadora Tonks, a much-loved character who can change the colour of her hair at will. A member of the Order of the Phoenix, she is killed by her aunt, Bellatrix Lestrange, during the Battle of Hogwarts. The final instalment of the film is released on Friday.

"You couldn't pick two more different projects," she says. "Harry Potter is such a huge machine, with thousands of people working on it. They book you for a period so I would be contractually bound for a certain number of months, which had its benefits and its downfalls. Sometimes I would go in and spend a week not doing anything. I'd get my hair and make-up done and wait and wait and wait. And then, out of nowhere, just when I'd chilled into watching Jeremy Kyle or something, just then they call you in. But the great thing is you're sitting there in between scenes in a room with some of the most amazing actors in the world. Just hanging out. You chat and watch them and learn from them and see how they work."The scheduled order of Harry Potter was in sharp contrast to the organised chaos of You Instead, but Tena found the experience of creating an entire film in something under 100 hours "exhilarating".

"No matter how much you script things, no matter how much you imagine what T in the Park is going to be like, it's nothing like being there yourself," she says. "Some of the characters we met, the partying, the amazing outfits. It was strange because we were at once almost part of it and completely not. It was weird because it felt like a night out, like one big party, but then it was a case of 'next scene' and back to 'reality' again. Yeah, it was definitely extreme …"

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