Director Geremy Jasper may have been concerned about many
things while making his debut feature Patti Cake$ but actress Danielle Macdonald wasn’t one of them. For the title role he needed a confident
young woman who could spit rhymes with ferocity and speed, while getting the
audience to identify with this rough-around-the-edges young woman who tries to
leave her poverty-stricken life behind by making it big in the arena of Rap
music. Macdonald was not musical, had never sung in her life, let alone rap,
and had never listened to anything from that genre. Despite all that, Jasper insists that,
“Within 10 minutes, I knew Danielle could do this role.”
It was quite a gamble to take but one that pays off
handsomely in Cake$ as Macdonald commands the screen whenever she appears,
not simply when she’s on stage schooling her competition or composing with her
partners Hareesh (Siddharth Dhananjay) and Basterd, the Antichrist (Mamoudou Athie)
but during the film’s more dramatic moments as the character who not only must
contend with bullying and self-esteem issues but her alcoholic mother (Bridget
Everett) and ailing grandmother (Cathy Moriarty) as well. This is a heavy load
for any performer to carry, but the young Australian actress proved to be more
than up to the task, despite her own misgivings.
Courtesy Fox Searchlight
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“I was petrified to do this role but that was something I
was looking for,” says Macdonald on a recent stop over in Chicago to promote
the film. “I’m so different from her,
it’s hard to feel like her – to be cool and confident- which I am not at all. If
it feels safe then that’s not much a challenge and I ended up getting exactly
that.”
When I asked about her lack of knowledge regarding rap music
and the world of the film, she readily admitted that was a concern. “Without a doubt, that was something I was
worried about but Geremy was very patient with me and guided me through the
whole process. He gave me discs and
playlists to listen to and I did that over and over again. I watched rap videos and studied the style
and movement of the artists but it was maybe three months in before I started
to rap on my own.”
Though in a supportive environment, Macdonald couldn’t help
but feel nervous when she first went behind the microphone. Fortunately, she had an ally in Everett who
helped put her at ease. “Bridget has a
long history with music and performing, so she could tell when I was
nervous. So she’d say, ‘Hey, let’s take
a walk,’ and we’d talk about the weather or something just to get my mind off
things. That helped a lot.”
Courtesy Fox Searchlight
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Despite the intense rap boot camp Jasper put her through and
the steady progress she made, Macdonald said it was “about a year,” before she
felt comfortable performing. The fruit
of her labor is firmly in the spotlight in the film as when her character gets
on stage, the actress completely dominates the scene, commanding the screen and
delivering an authentic portrayal that cuts to the core of the film’s theme.
As far as Jasper was concerned, he was thrilled to see that
Macdonald was willing to work so hard and while she might have had her doubts,
he never did. “There’s something about
Danielle that I knew was right. She has
a toughness about her that I don’t think she realizes she has. I showed a picture of her to my mother and
she asked, ‘Is that a girl from the neighborhood?’ At that point I knew I had
cast her correctly and she’d be able to do a great job in the role.”
Having worked on the film for a couple of years, Jasper took
his script and a demo of a few scenes that had been shot to the Sundance Film
Institute. Based on this work, he and
his cast were invited to workshop the project in Park City, Utah, their
expenses paid which freed them up to tackle the movie full on. “The Institute was a godsend,” says
Jasper. “The script was really rough
when we got there but thankfully they saw enough potential in it to invite us
to work. The characters were rough and
through our (Macdonald and Everett) being able to talk about them and improv scenes
with them, we were able to deepen the characters and make them more authentic. It was great to watch it all come together.”
While the final product has an undeniable sense of energy
and sympathetic characters you can’t help but root for, there’s no question
that it would be compared to 8 Mile and Hustle and Flow, films with similar
themes and settings. I asked him if he
was fearful “Cake$” might be seen as a knockoff of these two movies.
Courtesy Fox Searchlight
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“You can’t escape those films. 8 Mile and Hustle and
Flow are classics of the genre. I’ve
watched each of them many times myself.
But what I think makes our movie different is that it focuses on female characters
and has a very distinctive feminine energy.
I’m not just talking about Patti but her mother and grandmother as
well. All three of these women are stuck
in a life they don’t want and each is working in their own way to get out. So, I think our movie has a feminist approach
to it that makes it distinctive.”
As for what this pair is tacking in the future,
their respective projects couldn’t be more different. Jasper says that he’s working on an edgy
science-fiction film that he’s trying to keep under wraps. Macdonald is jumping
to the big time with Dumplin, a coming-of-age movie about a teenage girl who
falls in love and has to navigate the social minefield of high school. Jennifer Aniston has been cast as her mother
in the movie slated for summer 2018. The
actress is eager to break new ground.
“I’ve been in Patti’s world for three years and it’s been a crazy kind
of life. I’m anxious to move on to something new.”
