If the world ends, Danielle Deadwyler knows she’d survive.
“I will have a machete. I will have a gat,” she tells Entertainment Weekly, “I’m going to hunt and gather on these folks.” That confidence is something she has in common with her 40 Acres character Hailey Freeman, who you can meet in the post-apocalyptic thriller’s trailer, debuting exclusively with EW.
Directed by R.T. Thorne, 40 Acres follows Hailey, a veteran with a traumatic past, and her family, who are isolating on their farm to survive in a decimated world. Relying on her military background, Hailey runs her farm and family like a drill sergeant.
“Her past family trauma and her understanding of the world as a person who is coming from a military background, that’s all underlying why she has made this world the way that she has,” Deadwyler says.
While her careful planning and discipline have kept her loved ones alive and well, her children, including two teenagers, have begun to chafe under her iron rule. This is especially true for her son Emanuel (Kataem O’Connor), who wants more freedom to leave the farm’s well-fortified gates to make friends with neighboring settlements.
“Protecting the babies is what’s driving her throughout the film, which comes to the detriment of the children who are imagining a world beyond themselves and the farm,” she explains. “The outside world is not trying to love on your children in the way you do, but that’s a hard balance as [your children] get older.”
Magnolia Pictures
’40 Acres’ poster
Of course, just as Emanuel begins to convince his mom to loosen up, trouble — in the form of a group of bloodthirsty cannibals —comes knocking, leading to some heart-pounding action sequences.
“It ended up feeling very much like choreography,” Deadwyler says of her fight scenes. “We had much open space in order to make them dynamic. The body feels much more dynamic operating with multiple bodies in the space.”
While she had plenty of space to perform, she did not have much time to prepare. Deadwyler signed on to the film, which was shot during the SAG-AFTRA strike, on a waiver, about two weeks before shooting began. So, she relied on her own skills to play Hailey.
“I came in with the knowledge I had. We had specialty experts on set to help with guns, which I’ve had experience with before, and to help with the fighting. We worked with really dope folks in northern Toronto on the sequences,” she says of the film’s stunt team.
Magnolia Pictures
Danielle Deadwyler, Michael Greyeyes, Kataem O’Connor, Haile Amare, and Jaeda LeBlanc in ’40 Acres.’
Joining Hailey in her mission to protect her family is her husband, Galen (Michael Greyeyes), who also strives to pass down his indigenous culture to his children. “Michael Greyeyes is a beautiful representation of a patriarch, educating children about their world, about legacy, about the history of indigenous and Black culture,” Deadwyler says.
As a mother, Deadwyler relates to Hailey’s drive to protect her family, describing her relationship with her son, Ezra, as “symbiotic.” She adds, “We learn from our children as much as they learn from us.”
For Deadwyler, 40 Acres’ themes feel especially important given the current state of the world, not because of an impending apocalypse, but as a reminder of how important it is to step outside of ourselves. “It’s extremely present and urgent in this moment to connect to stories that are [about] how we get through hardship,” she says. “How do we have the hard conversations and begin to open our hearts?”
40 Acres hits theaters on July 2.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
