Lucy Fry on working with Will Smith on Bright

WORKING closely with Will Smith is pretty intimidating but after getting over her initial nerves, Lucy Fry noticed the superstar can do something she’s never seen before.

“I’M a hugger,” Lucy Fry says when you go to shake her hand, before pulling you into a warm but semi-awkward embrace, as is often the case with two strangers.

The Australian actor is back in town to spruik her latest project, Bright, a supernatural cop drama with Will Smith and Joel Edgerton, dropping on Netflix this Friday.

Up close, the Queensland native looks like a cross between Margot Robbie and Emilia Clarke — she was a runner-up in the Girlfriend Model Search competition at 15 — and she giggles, a lot. At 25 years old, Fry still seems excited to be on the promotional trail, meeting people and talking about her work, and is, endearingly, not as polished as some of the veterans in the business with their rehearsed, rote answers.

In Bright, working closely with such huge names — “I was so nervous because, ohmigod, there’s Will Smith” — was a big opportunity for the Aussie whose best known role so far has been as Eve in the Wolf Creek TV series, alongside credits in Vampire Academy, Now Add Honey, Mako: Island of Secrets, 11.22.63, Lightning Point and The Darkness.

“Will walks into a room and makes everyone feel good,” Fry says. “I’ve never met someone who just connects to people like he can, in the way that everyone in the whole room will feel like they’re seen by him. And he remembers everyone’s names.

“There was one night leading up to Christmas and we were all tired doing a night shoot and we were all cold in the fake rain and Will starts singing Christmas carols to get everyone through it. It was extraordinary.”

Though, Fry says she was disappointed he never broke out any of his old Fresh Prince material.

Lucy Fry with Will Smith at the Bright premiere in LA.

Bright is a combination of a gritty cop action flick set in a world where elves, orcs and centaurs are your neighbours. She plays Tikka, a runaway magical elf who spends the whole movie tied to Smith and Edgerton’s cop characters.

Fry confesses to be a giant Lord of the Rings fan, so when the opportunity to play an elf was a “dream”.

“Arwen and Galadriel [are my favourite LOTR characters], elves, obviously, I’m just obsessed.” she tells news.com.au.

Fry also shares her thoughts on the studliest of LOTR characters: “When I first watched the series at 10, I loved Legolas, and then as I got older, I thought Aragorn is a babe. Legolas is for the tweens and Aragorn is once you’re a little more mature and you can appreciate him.”

She laughs through this searing analysis, slightly embarrassed but unapologetic.

When she saw herself made up as Tikka for the first time, with the elf ears, the pointy teeth and the contact lenses, she thought “Holy big swear word, I can’t believe it was real, suddenly I wasn’t me anymore.”

That’s Joel Edgerton under all that prosthetic.

For her role in Bright, Fry had to learn a new version of elvish — different to Tolkien’s dialect — created by David Peterson, the man behind the Dothraki and Valyrian languages in Game of Thrones.

Fry says Bright’s elvish was based on ancient Finnish and she had to learn a lot more than the lines in her script because director David Ayer (Suicide Squad) likes actors to improvise on set.

“I got David Peterson to translate a lot of different possibilities for me because I never knew what I was going to say or do. I memorised so much stuff, I was such a nerd about it too, so studious.

“Then at the very end, Joel came up to me and said: ‘It’s so funny how David Peterson comes in and corrects you on the pronunciation on a language he made up.’ The only person who’s going to know what’s wrong is David Peterson, the rest of the world would think it’s fine.”

Fry adds it wasn’t just the elf aspect that excited her about Bright, she’s also a fan of magic realism in fiction — Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water is her favourite recent film.

“You can have the intimacy of a human relationship and then interweave something that elevates you as a viewer into a space of being imaginatively open and stimulated by myths and legends that come into play through that sort of fantasy.”

Bright will be released on Netflix on Friday, December 22.

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