Sky’s the limit for Neve Campbell’s fiery comeback in Skyscraper
TWO decades after she Screamed her way to the big time, Neve Campbell has teamed with Dwayne Johnson for an explosive big screen return — and her first ever action blockbuster.
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IF DWAYNE Johnson calls it a comeback, it’s a comeback.
After stepping away to raise her son Caspian, now six, Neve Campbell has followed her re-entry to the TV arena in House of Cards with an explosive big screen return in Johnson’s new action blockbuster, Skyscraper.
And no one is happier to see Campbell back than Johnson, who admits to downplaying his fanboy excitement at meeting the star of the Scream franchise and says it’s “an honour for Skyscraper to be her foray back into Hollywood”.
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Though it’s barely been two weeks since she announced that she and partner J.J. Field have adopted a second child, son Raynor, Campbell confirms that she is very much open for business.
“It took a while to step back in,” she says from Hong Kong, where Skyscraper is set.
“House of Cards was obviously a big deal for me, the last few things that I’ve been involved in have been quality and well-received, so this being the next step felt very appropriate.”
Skyscraper turned out to be not so much a step as a leap back into action.
A cross between The Towering Inferno and Die Hard, it casts Johnson as Will Sawyer, a corporate security adviser tasked with assessing the safety of the world’s tallest building.
Campbell is Sarah, Will’s wife and the surgeon who saved his life when he lost a leg to his previous FBI career. With their two children, they’re the first family to live in The Pearl … which is great until the building is set ablaze by baddies, Will is framed for it and Sarah and the kids are trapped above the fire line.
“The special thing about this script was the character was not written as the victim or the wife who has to be saved; she herself is a badass and as courageous and as strong as her counterpart,” Campbell says.
“For any parent, if you consider the possibility of your kids being in danger, it’s not difficult to imagine that you would do everything you can to help.”
With her background in ballet, swinging into action came naturally: “Choreography, timing — all of the disciplines that you learn as a dancer definitely come in handy when you’re doing fight sequences.”
However, Campbell has to confess that finally having the chance to get her Sigourney Weaver on came as a surprise.
“It’s not something as an actress you expect when you hit 44, that you’re gonna have your first big blockbuster action film, but I was really pleased.”
She was also pleasantly surprised to find herself, just two years Johnson’s junior, playing an age-appropriate Hollywood spouse.
“How rare is that?” she laughs. “It doesn’t happen that often.”
The way producer Hiram Garcia tells it, once Campbell stepped into her chemistry read with Johnson — “She put him in his place a couple of times” — there was no other woman in the running.
How does Campbell remember it?
“I flew to Atlanta, he was shooting Rampage at the time. All the women were waiting because he could only do the auditions between takes. So it was 9pm by the time I got to do the audition and at that point I was so over my nerves, my adrenaline had run out, that I was actually really relaxed when I went in.
“I just took the bull by the horns. He was wearing a harness because he was doing an action sequence at the time and I grabbed it a few times and shook him,” she laughs, “and they hadn’t expected that. The dynamic between us and the improvisation felt easy and fun. So when I left the test, I certainly was hopeful I would get it.”
Get it she did, and working with Johnson turned out to be just as breezy.
“He’s a super-nice guy, really supportive, really generous, got a great sense of humour, so it wasn’t difficult to feel comfortable.”
When Skyscraper wrapped, Johnson tweeted he needed “a tequila, vacation and therapy” to recover. What state was Campbell in?
“I actually ended up getting spinal surgery like four weeks after, so I needed a bit more than tequila!”
The spinal surgery wasn’t all Skyscraper’s fault — blame it on “years and years of compromising my back as a dancer”.
But there was a “final straw that literally broke the camel’s back” on set: the scene where she carries her movie son across a plank.
“I made the choice of carrying him … hindsight, you know,” she laughs.
Back in shape by the time baby Raynor arrived, Campbell is now more than happy with the prospect of juggling motherhood and movies.
And while she won’t commit to the grind of a network TV show — “I turned down 11 pilots this year” — she is developing two TV ideas of her own, “because I can mould it to the lifestyle that I want”.
House of Cards gave her that quality without the all-encompassing commitment. Ambitious campaign manager LeAnn Harvey was last seen being run off the road at the end of season five; Campbell confirms she won’t be back for the Netflix hit’s sixth season.
“But I’m excited they’re getting to do a final season because they weren’t certain whether that was going to happen … with the drama,” she says, referring to Kevin Spacey’s firing after being accused of sexual misconduct.
Campbell has an unfortunate six degrees of separation with several of the high-profile men felled by the #MeToo movement: Harvey Weinstein produced the Scream movies and James Toback directed her in the 2004 sex drama When Will I Be Loved?
“It’s ridiculous,” she nods. “My agents started calling me and saying, ‘Neve, can you just tell us who’s next because it seems like everybody you’ve worked with is one of these people’.
“It’s an interesting time. It’s sad to see people fall, but it’s good that these women are coming out and being honest about the way they’ve been treated. It’s admirable, because it’s a very scary thing to have to do. And it’s time that certain behaviours are no longer allowed in this business and that we no longer feel it’s just part of this world and we just go along with it, because it’s actually never been OK.”
Campbell entered Canada’s National Ballet School aged nine, started working in TV aged 18, was cast in Party of Five at 20 and hit it big with Scream at 23. Does she feel she had to learn to protect herself at a young age?
“I don’t know what it is,” she replies, “I don’t want to say it’s the way I carried myself, it wasn’t that at all because God forbid anyone should judge themselves for what happens to them. I think I was lucky in the sense that I had success very early and it gave me a certain amount of power, so people weren’t going to take advantage, because they needed me; I wasn’t going to be messed with by certain people because they wanted me to do the next sequel.
“So I feel very, very lucky that ended up being my circumstance. That’s not to say that I haven’t suffered abuse in my life — I have — just not in the industry itself. I’ve been able to dodge it.”
— Skyscraper opens on Thursday.
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