Planet of the Apes star Freya Allan on filming Down Under and feeling sorry for Liam Hemsworth
The Witcher star Freya Allan reveals why she loved filming Kingdom Of the Planet of the Apes in Australia.
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Any time her castmates or crew members complained about filming the new Planet of the Apes movie in the sometimes brutal Australian summer, Freya Allan was silently counting her blessings.
The UK actor is best known as the warrior-mage-princess Siri in three seasons (with a fourth currently shooting) of Netflix’s hit fantasy The Witcher, which is very much at the other extreme, shooting in the frigid outdoors in eastern Europe and the UK.
“Honestly when I was out there, a lot of people saying ‘this is so hard’,” she laughs over a Zoom call from the UK. “And I was thinking ‘Jesus, compared to the bloody Witcher, this is a dream’.
“Firstly, on The Witcher you have to get up at God knows what time – like 4.30 in the morning – because of the light and that wasn’t a problem out there. So for me that shoot was a dream in that regard. I love the sun, so the weather was so nice to not be freezing.”
The Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, the fourth film in the reboot of the beloved 1960s sci-fi franchise was partly shot on soundstages in Sydney over the summer of 2022/2023, but it was the outdoor sets in the bush outside the city that really captivated Allan, despite the presences of leeches, goannas and the odd falling branch.
“I love Australian people,” she enthuses. “You guys have the best sense of humour and I honestly had the best time … many night shoots with lots of laughs and a feeling of camaraderie, and the temperature being so hot it made those nights shoots just so fun.
“I remember one time coming on to set and the crew were just pumping music out of their trucks before we started filming, and it just felt like a little mini festival. The spirits were very high.”
After three seasons of battling monsters and evil sorcerers on The Witcher, the 22-year-old Allan had envisaged something very different as her next major project. She thought that she’d like to try something much more grounded and less effects driven and “very conversational”. But, having been a fan of the franchise ever since she saw 2014’s Dawn Of the Planet of the Apes at the movies as a 12-year-old, the prospect of playing one of the few key human characters in a menagerie of CGI chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans, proved too tempting to resist.
By the time she arrived in Australia, Allan’s simian co-stars, led by compatriot Owen Teague as idealistic and charismatic young chimp Noa, had already been in “ape school” for several weeks, learning animal behaviours and how to act while wearing leg extensions, performance capture suits and the bulky headgear that would record their every facial expression. Allan describes ape school as “a terrifying place” but it was also a reminder that this would be an experience like no other.
“I walked in there the first day I got to Australia and they had been there for, like, three weeks and all I could hear was ape noises,” she laughs. “It was like a zoo and they were all walking around as apes on the extensions and I was like ‘holy f---, what is going on?’.
“I’m walking into a dungeon full of humans pretending to be chimpanzees and it was quite something. But instantly I was like ‘this is going to be a special film – this is going to be a very unique and fun experience’.”
Allan says that the process of filming alongside CGI characters was odd at first, but soon became something she didn’t give a second thought. Walking on to set in the morning, she’d sometimes hear her co-stars hooting and grunting loudly to warm up for scenes, leaving her in awe of their commitment and vulnerability. And many of the outdoor scenes, she would have to shoot once opposite the actors in their full get-up and then do the same scene talking to thin air.
“Because they had been trained so well honestly it just became normal,” she says. “They were so good being the apes and embodied it completely. A lot of people ask me ‘are you imagining them as apes as you’re doing it?’ And I didn’t really need to because they were so great by that point and really had become the apes.
“Yes, the suits were quite strange. I didn’t envy them on that. They do look very stupid and they’d say that as well. Especially the blue ones because whenever the apes touch a human they have to wear blue suit and so we called them blueberries or Smurfs every time they came to set with those on.”
Allan is cagey about saying too much about her character Nova in the new film, which is set 300 years after the previous film, when a worldwide pandemic has left apes with enhanced intelligence and either killed or rendered mute the vast bulk of humanity. She’ll admit that Nova, seemingly a feral scavenger when first encountered by Noa, has a “brilliant arc” and also serves as “the anchor” for the human audience but is loath to say much more about her backstory or her actions.
She also says that being the first film in the franchise to be released after the Covid-19 pandemic gave the new chapter an odd plausibility that the earlier films might not have had.
“It’s crazy,” she says. “Any moment where that was mentioned within the film it is an eerie sensation of it being so relevant to what we’ve been through recently and kind of suddenly makes it feel a lot more real and possible, which is great to be able to imagine and relate to and it makes the plot even more terrifying as viewers.”
Allan’s fighting and stunt training on The Witcher gave her a big head-start on some of the action scenes for KOTPOTA and having fallen in love with the stunt work as Siri transformed from a runaway princess to a formidable fighter under the watchful eye of Henry Cavill’s Geralt of Rivia, she was once again determined to do as much as possible herself.
“Any time I’d come to set and see my stunt double, who was lovely by the way and we got on like a house on fire, but if I ever saw her standing in my place, I’d be storming over to the first AD to say ‘excuse me, just double checking that no one’s doing my little bit’,” she says. “And they’d be like ‘No, we are just testing it out’. And I’d like ‘well okay, but as long as there isn’t a camera because I’m doing it’. And so they couldn’t rein me in really – they didn’t really have a choice – I was just going to do it.”
Allan is still adjusting to the prospect of making the fourth season of The Witcher without Cavill, who quit the franchise after the last season and was replaced by Aussie Liam Hemsworth.
“I was shocked,” she says of Cavill’s departure. “It was a surprise and you become very close through your character with the person that’s playing your adopted father. So I almost felt like, as crazy as this sounds, that I was kind of mourning through Siri because obviously it’s never going to feel quite the same from playing her with someone else as Geralt. But at the very same time, I think it’s nice to have a different interpretation and a fresh face and I’m excited to see what Liam does.”
Knowing The Witcher’s passionate and outspoken online fan base as well as she does, Allan is all too aware of the big shoes that the Aussie has to fill but she says she found him to be “lovely” on their first meeting and hopes that the audiences will cut him some slack.
“I feel sorry for him because obviously there’s a lot of chat around because he is taking over someone else’s role,” she says. “But I hope he just feels supported and once we get going, I think he’s going to fit in with everyone really well.”
As for what’s in store for Ciri in the coming season, Allan says that audiences will see a new and darker side to the character which she’s very excited to play.
“The poor love never has a day off,” she says. “But there’s a very dark turn this season and it’s going to be a very different version of Siri than the one we’ve seen in any of the previous three seasons. It’s going to feel very strange for me because it’s not quite the same person I’m going into but I’m very excited to tackle that.”
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is in cinemas May 9.
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