Alexandra Daddario is mighty busy right now. Not only does she have the long-awaited movie, Die in a Gunfight, available to watch in theaters and on demand, but also the new HBO series, The White Lotus, which has begun its run with Episode 2 due to air on Sunday at 9pm.
Daddario stars alongside Diego Boneta in Die in a Gunfight as Mary and Ben, respectively. A spin on Romeo and Juliet, they’re star-crossed lovers forbidden to be together by their powerful, feuding families. And then in The White Lotus, Daddario is part of a group of hotel guests vacationing at a fancy Hawaiian resort, with the social satire digging into the complexities of these wealthy guests and the resort’s eager-to-please employees.
With so much to celebrate right now, Daddario joined us for an episode of Collider Ladies Night to retrace her steps from the very beginning of her Hollywood journey to these new projects, beginning with a mighty popular young adult book-to-film adaptation, Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief. When talking about seemingly silly questions about moviemaking one might be afraid to ask when they're first starting out, Daddario noted her eagerness to see playback early on:
“Now I know it’s not very polite to ask for playback, for example. Directors don’t love when actors are constantly asking to see the scene back, for good reason! Because they don’t want the shot to be judged, they don’t want you to analyze the performance too much. But I would always just wander right up to Chris Columbus and be like, ‘Can I see that back?’ [Laughs] I would never do that now!”
Even though Daddario stopped asking to see playback, she still sees the value in how having access to it early on helped her evolve her craft:
“So I actually think that initially, off the bat, it was very helpful. I think a point came where it was not, but someone else mentioned this to me, they’re like, athletes, baseball players, they record themselves swinging and watch it to see the slightest changes that they need to make or see what they did wrong. So I think there was a period of my career, and one of the things I’m so grateful for is, I do think that I was being cast in things, and I had been to acting class for years and I also needed to get older and wiser, but I was being cast in things and I still had so much to learn and watching myself back really helped me be like, ‘Oh, that’s why that felt weird.’ It looks weird because I did this or I was in my head, or whatever it was. So I think that there were things I learned and then, at a certain point, it didn’t help me anymore because I was past that point. I didn’t need to watch myself. What I needed to do was get out of my head more.”
Another skill Daddario’s picked up over the years? Being able to cry on cue:
“I can cry quite easily! I mean, years of practice. The other thing about being an actor that’s kind of interesting is we’re taught in regular life not to cry at the drop of a hat and to suppress our emotions to get through the day, you know? And as an actor, you’re sort of trained to do the opposite. You’re trained to understand what makes you angry, understand what makes you sad and know how to access that very quickly.”
If you’re looking for more acting insights from Daddario and memories from films including Percy Jackson, Texas Chainsaw 3D, We Summon the Darkness and, of course, Die in a Gun Fight, click here to watch Daddario’s episode of Collider Ladies Night or check out the uncut version of the conversation in podcast form below!