Robin Tunney is a Wonderful Actress

Robin Tunney is starring in Open Window, directed by Mia Goldman. Robin plays Goldman’ ego, newly engaged photographer Izzy, who is brutally assaulted at home by an intruder (Matt Keeslar). She then withdraws from virtually everyone, leaving her fiancé (Australian actor Joel Edgerton) distressed at being unable to help her get past her trauma.

In casting Tunney, Goldman recalls, “I felt I wanted someone fresh, in the sense of somebody who was a wonderful actress but hadn’t done this kind of thing before. Robin was offered the role very early on, and she was with us for four years before we got all the financing together. I just thought she was perfect for the role.”

Goldman also was sold from the start on Edgerton (Kinky Boots), a relative newcomer to American audiences. She says he has “such range and such depth, he can play anything. We never discussed it, but I felt he had a personal understanding of the film and its message.” So did Goldman’s brother-in-law, fellow filmmaker Todd Field (In the Bedroom), an executive producer of Open Window.

Until shooting was completed, Goldman didn’t get too specific about how much Open Window was about her. “I sort of assumed when I read it that it had actually happened, but I didn’t ask,” Tunney says. “I got the very broad strokes, and maybe three days after we finished, Mia and I had dinner, and she told me a little more. From what I’ve heard from women who have seen the film, people really identify with the stages of grief that Izzy goes through.”

Tunney hopes to do more work on the order of Open Window, believing she has more leverage after her broad exposure on Fox’s Prison Break. She remains surprised by some fans’ reactions to the murder of her character, attorney Veronica, in season two (which arrives September 4 on DVD).

“It’s an odd thing,” she says. “The week after I ‘died’ on the show, I was celebrating a friend’s birthday in Texas, and we went to a spa. The woman at the check-in counter started crying and said to me, ‘I am so sorry!’ She was just so upset, I said, ‘It’s not real, you know.’ That character had her run, and there wasn’t anything else she could do. We all knew that going in.”

Goldman already has two more movies in the works to direct, and she hopes those prove as collaborative as she found Open Window to be.

“I was buoyed by my producers, the cast and the crew,” she says. “Everybody was a partner on this.”

Source: Jamaica Gleaner