X-Men: Dark Phoenix star Sophie Turner came prepared for her role as Jean Grey. Ahead of and during production, the Game of Thrones alum applied real-world research on schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder for Jean's transformation into the Dark Phoenix. In this CBR-exclusive behind-the-scenes video, Turner and the film's cast and crew explain how and why they took this approach.
"Rarely have I ever seen somebody come to a movie more prepared than Sophie [Turner] was," producer Hutch Parker confessed.
"Sophie did all kinds of research, especially on schizophrenia. She would walk around in preparation for the movie with headphones in her ears with just random voices playing so that she would know what it felt like to have to walk through the world hearing voices that you couldn't control," added writer-director Simon Kinberg.
In addition to the behind-the-scenes video, Fox shared two such videos -- including a schizophrenia simulation and an auditory hallucination simulation -- with CBR.
"The thing about Jean Grey is that she is not a villain, but she's not like a superhero," Turner explained. "She's very tormented and broken and has a real kind of realism to her."
"I made a conscious decision before I started to lose all my inhibitions and go for it and not be self-conscious or vain, because often that happens a lot with actors and it certainly happened with me and I just wanted to have this be my give-it-all," she shared. "Every single scene is an opportunity for me to stretch myself in ways that I haven't."
"We wanted all of these fantastical things that are happening to Jean to be grounded in reality in a way," Turner explained to CBR in June. "So we studied schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder and immediately, just researching it, you can just kind of feel a person's frustration and anger that they can't control this thing within them. So, when Jean lets out this Phoenix Force, it manifests itself in very destructive ways and a lot of that is because of the frustration of not being able to control this thing and not being allowed express it as well, for fear that it might hurt someone, so that's where her rage comes from."
Directed and written by Simon Kinberg, Dark Phoenix stars James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Nicholas Holt, Sophie Turner, Tye Sheridan, Alexandra Shipp, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Evan Peters and Jessica Chastain. The film is set to release digitally on September 3 and will release on 4k Ultra HD, Blu-ray and DVD on September 17.