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Thursday, September 8, 2011

Jennifer Ehle's 'Contagion' scientist role grows


The ads for Steven Soderbergh's "Contagion" flaunt the pandemic-nightmare drama's high-powered cast: Marion Cotillard, Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet. Not pictured: The actress playing the CDC researcher working desperately to find a vaccine, an actress who happens to have a BAFTA, a SAG and two Tony Awards on her shelf. But Jennifer Ehle understands; she felt as if her Dr. Ally Hextall had a couple of strikes against her from the start.

"That particular story line originally ended with Ally making (a radical choice), and then you never saw her again. And I remember Steven saying, 'Oh, we must tie that up,' " says Ehle, admitting she was afraid her story line would be slashed to ribbons. "They're never going to get to the point when they edit this together and they need more story. And they have so many extraordinary people in this, I couldn't imagine this character ... and I thought, even in Steven's hands, many people won't want more science. Then suddenly, in the spring, three more scenes arrived" for additional shooting.

"And apparently when it was tested, what people - and most hearteningly, young people - wanted was more science. That's our future, and I think that's a really good sign that that had a lot to do with what made Ally amplified."

The remarkably beautiful Ehle reads as warm, vivacious and possessed of a powerful intellectual curiosity. So it's no surprise she soaked up all she could in sessions with epidemiologist Dr. Ian Lipkin, whom the New York Times once dubbed the man from whom viruses can't hide.

Respect science more

"To be able to do the kind of experiments and be talked through so many things I would have had to study for years to get a chance to do - to mash up brains and code things and discover sequencing," she says, beaming, "I came away with even more respect for science than I had before. Which I think is fairly unfashionable."

Although Lipkin's Columbia University team was eager to share the secrets of the microscopic creatures that can kill us all, the actress was equally excited by more mundane details.

"The simple way you open one thing when you're holding another thing and another thing. You know, they thought I'd find it useful to know how to code the DNA. 'Well, that's great, it's extraordinary to be here learning it, but - to be able to hold something like that ...'

"And just to watch the way he explained things. Ally had to explain so much of the science to the audience, which I loved. Ian does it in such an unintimidating way, so that helped me figure out how to do that too."

Parallel story lines

The film follows several parallel story lines - CDC researchers (led by Ehle), field operatives (such as Winslet) and bosses (Fishburne); a World Health Organization epidemiologist (Cotillard) tracking the outbreak's source; an ordinary family (Damon, Paltrow).

And then there's Jude Law's conspiracy theorist blogger Alan Krumweide, whose alarmist rhetoric starts its own kind of contagion from his base in San Francisco. Law had no scenes with Ehle but shares her birthday and worked with her in 1997's "Wilde." They met when, as teens, they attended a protest to save the foundations of the Rose Theatre near London.

Law enjoyed some unique experiences of his own while shooting in the city.

"Going to the 49ers stadium when it was empty with a huge helicopter hovering over it was quite a one-off experience," he says.

He also got to storm out of the newsroom of this paper, shouting, "Print is a dead medium!" And then there was walking through San Francisco streets deserted but for refuse bags and men in biohazard suits.

"Those images are sort of at the heart of what's effective about the film. It's a terrific city to walk around, San Francisco, it's similar to New York or London that way; the life on the streets. So stepping onto a set that was like a ghost town was really harrowing."


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