Mother Nature: Annes Elwy on The Feast

It’s hard to know for sure whether Mother Nature has a human, physical form, but if she did, you’d imagine she might look something like Annes Elwy. Few are as well placed as the Welsh actor to wrestle with the responsibility and power this all-pervasive presence has, after starring in Lee Haven Jones’ fantasy horror film The Feast.

Not a political manifesto nor an aggressively reported attack on the very real violence mankind has inflicted on the planet we’re lucky enough to live on, the film is much smarter – and funnier – in its evisceration of the über-rich and simmering warning of the consequences of misusing our land.

Beyond its environmental message, there’s much to chew on (yes) in The Feast: and it all revolves around Elwy’s performance as the silent village girl Cadi, hired to help cater a party for a wealthy politician’s family. The guests? A neighbouring farmer, and a businessman drilling for oil. What could go wrong?

Unpacking the hurricane of primal influences, homegrown talent and last suppers, Annes Elwy tells MASSIVE about the most urgent film you’ll see this year.

If you had to describe The Feast without giving too much away, what would be your one-liner?

That’s tricky. I think it's essentially either a folk horror or an environmental horror. I think it has to have one word aside from just horror because I don't think it's really a horror.

What makes it different from a standard horror film?

I think it doesn't really have the things you're most used to. You're expecting jump-scares, or ghosts... With a usual horror, you're preparing yourself to feel absolutely terrified, to have quite an over-the-top reaction but The Feast is very slow and it's very quiet. And I don't think it necessarily even looks like a traditional horror.

I find it interesting with your role in particular in the way you subvert the trope of “scream queens” by, well, being completely silent. She’s very unnerving but not in an overwhelmingly terrifying way like you say.

One of the things that drew me to the part was that she would be such an unusual character to play. She barely says anything and is a very still person. It’s not her intention to terrify, she goes in as quite a gentle force. She’s so tuned in to her senses. She takes everything in, like a child would or even an animal. There's something quite sensual about her. Because she's not like other humans, that's what's slightly unnerving because you don't really trust her. I think that just comes from the fact that she doesn't have those social norms that we know how to adopt. She doesn't play all those normal human games, smiling and being polite, all of those.

When you don’t have dialogue, is there something more primal in the way you get in to character? Is it a more physical experience?

It’s definitely more primal. I didn’t really know how to prepare because I think for her it’s all about what’s around you. I had to wait until I was in that specific house and in those fields, and actually feeling the walls and feeling the land. There was always plenty of time to settle in to what your environment was.

It was more about making that switch in your brain to just drop everything and look, and feel. The process of playing her was really meditative – you abandoned all your active thoughts and were just so present that it was a really relaxing role to play, in a strange way.

Lee has named Scarlett Johansson’s character in Under the Skin as an inspiration – and MASSIVE conducted a poll among leading film critics who voted Under the Skin the best British film of the 21st century. What conversations did you have about that film?

I watched that film and I watched Dogtooth, because obviously reading the script, I could tell that it was very strange, but I couldn't quite visualize how it would pan out. It was really useful just to watch a character like Scarlett Johansson's character – someone that isn't fully human. How much does my character adopt human traits? How much does she just go along with things and laugh? Because she knows.

It’s quite noteworthy for an English-speaking audience that this Wales-based horror is all, well, in Welsh. Did it feel like you were doing something special on set or was it just normal?

In the horror genre and even within the film industry, we don't make that many films in Welsh. But from a day-to-day perspective, I speak Welsh much more frequently than I do English. Welsh is my first language and Welsh is what I would always have spoken with Lee the director and all the other actors anyway, so we didn't see like a strange experience in that. And I feel like emotionally, especially my earlier years, I experienced the world in Welsh, and so acting in it is not a strange experience at all. It feels more truthful. Obviously, I'm more than used to speaking English and performing in English. But really, if you are going back to primal instincts, my primal instincts as a first language speaker are in Welsh.

I think it's very in keeping with this story, which is so much about your connection to your land and your culture and your heritage and the folklore that surrounds you. It would make no sense for us to do something set in Wales, talking about all of this, while having made a strange decision to perform in English. But it will be interesting for English audiences to see that, and hopefully it won't be that different to them, whether they were seeing a Korean film or a German film a French film. But it will be interesting, because I'm sure a lot of people probably don't even notice that Welsh is a real living, breathing language. And it's just two hours away from London.

Watching The Feast a few days after the historic heatwaves in the UK solidifies the issues already present in the film about our complex relationship with the Earth. How much was that on your mind while filming?

It's really terrifying, and I absolutely hated that heatwave, it was so scary, especially because you think, well, this is gonna happen more and more. Sometimes it feels like it's so beyond our control, because we can't make decisions on behalf of other people. And we're not the people in power, and it is a really frustrating situation to be in. But I also think we had the whole lockdown period where suddenly you saw how quickly nature did come back. We all noticed how much more birds we were hearing, and that happened very quickly. So it did give you that glimmer of hope, that actually if we just collectively decided to make a change, maybe it's not too late.

We made this film obviously before COVID, and before the heatwave, but it's still at the time where there was a lot of talk about fracking. And of course this film is definitely about how we misuse the land, mistreat the Earth, and how easy it is to see financial gain in things for an instant gratification over the long term consequences. But I think the film's not really saying anything new. But because it's such a slow, quiet film, you can't just ignore it. You have to sit with how uncomfortable it is to acknowledge how we are to the Earth.

It feels similar to the way you wake up one day and it’s 42 degrees, and you just have to sit in it until it passes. We’ve made this world, now we have to live in it.

What’s also interesting is that these stories about how you should respect Mother Nature, global stories or local stories, they’ve been passed down for generations. It’s in the oldest pieces of literature we have – we’ve been talking about it for so long, yet it feels like it never really takes hold.

Finally, you must have thought about this already: what would your last supper be?

I listen to the Table Manners podcast and they talk about this loads, so I’ve thought about this so much – yet I’m making so little progress because I love food!

I know it would definitely feature a bread basket of all different types of bread. Bread and butter is my favourite thing. Maybe one final meal would be a breakfast buffet, somewhere in the French countryside where they grow lots of fruit, they bake all the bread. There will be nice cheeses – that kind of buffet that goes on and on, and it’s all nice, fresh, local produce.

The Feast will be released in UK cinemas on August 19.

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