Jane Levy: I had to be crazy to get the job

MANILA, Philippines - “Auditioning is such an unnatural thing. You’re in a tiny little room with, like, seven people cramped together, acting to a casting director  just none of it makes any sense,” Hollywood newcomer Jane Levy explained to this writer during the junket for Sony’s Evil Dead, held in Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago.

“I had to act like I was being buried alive, walk slowly, turning into a demon in my audition sitting in a folding chair,” she continued. “I knew I had to be really crazy to get this job so I was stomping and I was screaming and I was crying and I was growling — and I was so ashamed of myself after the audition that I ran out of the room and I had my agent call and make sure that they didn’t think I was being rude, that I was just too embarrassed of the stuff that I had to do.”

She must have made quite an impression because she did get the job after that audition.

Jane is not exactly new to the business. She has acted in small films before but many people know her more for her role as a teenager forced to live with her dad in a suburb filled with quirky but interesting characters in the TV sitcom called Suburgatory. The show is a hit and is now on its second season.

Although she wouldn’t consider her role in Evil Dead her breakthrough, “No, I don’t know what that means,” she remarked after I broached the idea that, after this movie, her career could just skyrocket because of the built-in fanbase of the original Evil Dead series that almost guarantees that this remake will be a hit. (Note: Evil Dead opened as the No. 1 movie in the US when it opened first week of April.)

“I am not gonna consider it before… I mean, who knows? I don’t think about things in terms of breakout,” she humbly said. “Yes, it has the potential to be a blockbuster, we’ll see in two weeks but that’s in no way why I took on the project. I feel like it is someone else’s job to think about that stuff. My job is to just care about the project and do the best I can do. But I mostly wanted to do it because it was so different from the television show that I work on.”

Jane stars in Evil Dead as a young woman whose life has been marred by loss and addiction. She is on the verge of completely wasting away her life if not for the timely intervention by her brother and her two childhood friends.

This premise sets the stage for the bold reimagining of one of the most original and successful horror movies ever made. It’s a bloody and gruesome remake and is being touted by many as the most terrifying movie one will see in cinemas this year. (In the Philippines, the movie has been rated R without cuts and will screen exclusively at all Ayala Cinemas starting May 8.)

This writer is not a huge fan of the genre but I still enjoyed it because there are elements in the movie that made me go see past the on-screen gore and instead peer through the metaphor on drug addiction that the filmmakers cleverly anchored to the main plot. But I still had my eyes closed most of the time when I watched the movie during the preview screening. The gore and carnage is so over-the-top that the audience will feel like they are being bathed with thousands of gallons of fake blood used in the movie.

And when I told Fede Alvarez, the Uruguayan director of the movie, a Hollywood newcomer himself, that I found some of the scenes in the movie just gross and repulsive, he surprisingly smiled and even thanked me. Apparently, it was how they envisioned the movie.

Jane had a different reaction than me when she watched the movie and she had an understandable explanation: “No, I am not scared at all. It would be impossible to be scared of yourself.”

But she admitted that the script got her when she first read it. “I thought, ‘Oh my god, are you kidding?’ Like, it just gets more and more extreme but that was exciting and fun.”

And she did everything that the script asked! “I have yet to say no,” she meekly revealed. “I don’t know. I just felt like I should do anything that the project asked of me.”

Like this writer, Jane admitted that she is not a fan of horror movies, too. “I don’t find them repulsive or bad for the world, I just don’t like being scared that much. I don’t like roller coasters. I don’t like bungee jumping. I don’t like snow boarding really fast down the hill. I am not someone who is an adrenaline junkie.”

But she likes taking risks if it comes to what she wants in life.

Jane didn’t always dream of becoming an actress. She grew up in a small Northern California town and, when she was 19, she decided she didn’t want to go to school anymore so she packed her bags, moved to L.A., enrolled in an acting school, and now, just four years later she is already starring in a TV hit and is the lead star in one of the most-anticipated movies of the year.

“I was auditioning for everything! Anyone that would give me a job, I would have taken it. At the beginning, it’s just you want to work.”

Hollywood is not an easy place for any aspiring actors. Thousands dream and thousands fail every year. And even when you get in, there’s no absolute guarantee that you will always be in because one will always have to compete with hundreds of talents for that one particular role. And Jane has her Hollywood battle plan laid out starting with the very basic: She considers acting as a job not as a platform to become famous.

“No job is really easy and in every job there is competition and you feel like a failure a lot of times,” she declared. “I think it’s, sort of, what life is. People like to glamorize what we do as something so different but we’re just people going to work everyday.”

“I didn’t grow up watching movies and thinking, ‘Oh, I wanna be in those!’ I like being a part of something. You know, all over the world, maybe besides literature, there’s nothing that touches many people as movies do. People see them everywhere. Our work mostly is to show people they are not alone and I love being a part of that process and it’s great for an artist to make something that so many people will see.”

As we concluded the interview, Jane revealed that she is set to do the sequel to Evil Dead.