We spoke with Alice Englert following the release of her new dark comedy Bad Behaviour, which she wrote and directed in addition to leading alongside the great Jennifer Connelly. Englert has made a name for herself in Hollywood, and not just because she’s the daughter of Oscar-winning filmmaker Jane Campion. Englert has even starred in several of Campion’s projects, such as The Power of the Dog and Top of the Lake.
“I loved it,” Englert told MovieWeb, reflecting on being directed by her mother in the past. “I thought it was so much fun because in the rest of my life, I don’t like being told what to do by mom, and it was kind of almost like, ‘Alright, you want to tell me what to do? Well, I’ll do what you want me to do!’ And it was so great. She loves telling me what to do, and I love to resist, but it was just in that area that actually sometimes we have a more fluent… we’re both quite playful… But yeah, that was really wonderful. I loved doing that. It was brilliant fun.”
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Bad Behaviour Review: Dark, Disjointed Mother-Daughter Comedy with Jennifer Connelly
Director Alice Englert, daughter of Oscar-winner Jane Campion, also stars as the stuntwoman daughter of a former child star in distress.
Stunt Performers Are ‘Heroes’
More recently, Englert was both behind and in front of the camera for Bad Behaviour, which follows a mother-daughter duo who both have careers in the entertainment industry. “It’s not inspired by my mom,” Englert confirmed to us. “She is a hell of a character, and I love her to death, but it’s definitely inspired by retreats I went to as a teenager, and this feeling of seeing people at a point where they were beginning to drop the roleplay of adulthood in search of something they felt they had kind of buried or left behind, and then lost the map for it.”
Englert, who plays a stuntwoman named Dylan in Bad Behaviour, continued, “I wrote it out of appreciation for [stunts], because, you know, I’ve been around the block, and I’ve definitely tried to step in and have my own Tom Cruise moment of like, ‘I’m gonna do it!’ and ended up with, like, some busted-open toe and all that. So I have a deep appreciation for what those heroes do.”
Speaking of Tom Cruise, playing Dylan’s colorful mom in the film is Top Gun: Maverick star Jennifer Connelly in a standout performance that might strike a nerve in troubled mother-daughter dynamics everywhere. Englert told us:
“I just loved working with Jennifer.
She’s so generous and remarkable and smart… She can just be really funny
… It kind of worked out that because I spent so much of time directing her that I kind of had this up-close view of every microexpression, every version of who she was that actually worked really well for the mother-daughter. There was something about her that made sense with where Dylan was coming from, in that the parent feels larger than life and yet so intimate and austere.”
Bad Behaviour is now available on demand and digital.