Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Six years after making his film debut as “Truant at Pool” in The Olsen Twins‘s last teen caper, New York Minute, Joey Klein was on the Toronto set of The Vow, playing one of Channing Tatum‘s musician roommates. There he met Tatiana Maslany, the actress cast as Tatum’s character’s recording studio employee. Curious about his new friend, Klein went to nearby Queen Video and rented her most recent film, Grown Up Movie Star, where the then-24-year-old portrayed a girl, 13, who lets her father’s paraplegic best friend take risqué pictures of her, among other things. Impressed, Klein asked Maslany to star in the first feature film he wrote and directed. But first they co-starred in “Waiting For You,” his five-minute short.
While Klein readied The Other Half, Maslany became famous for her role as Sarah Manning (and clones) on Orphan Black. Back in Toronto, over a Summer 2015 hiatus, Maslany and her boyfriend, Tom Cullen (Lady Mary’s onetime suitor, Anthony Gillingham, on Downton Abbey) reunited with Klein. Day one, they read through the script. Day two, they decided what each character would wear. Days three through 16, cameras rolled. Maslany and Cullen acted opposite each other and served as executive producers (Cullen and Klein also collaborated on the music). “We were such lucky fuckers that we were able to make a film with our friends,” Cullen told me. Last year, in between the 103-minute film’s SXSW premiere and Canadian limited-release, Maslany won an Emmy. Also, Queen Video shuttered. Today, The Other Half is out in U.S. theaters and video on demand. Decider sat down with Klein, Maslany and Cullen at the Crosby Street Hotel on Sunday, what turned out to be Klein’s 40th birthday.
Emily (Maslany) and Nickie (Cullen) require very few words in The Other Half to begin their courtship, right after she watches him get fired from busing tables at a café. Not long after visiting Emily while she’s at work supervising a basketball court full of kids, Nickie tells her that��his much-younger brother has been missing back in the UK for five years; one day, he didn’t turn up at school. She’s familiar with such grief: her mother committed suicide. On the night Emily plans to introduce Nickie to her family, her father (Henry Czerny) and step-mother (Suzanne Clément) call the police when she experiences a manic episode (she has Rapid Cycling Bipolar Disorder). That dinner finally happens about a year later, though quickly turns awkward when Emily—to Nickie’s surprise—asks her father to give the couple a loan so she can attend art school in the UK. “Emily’s involved with a process that requires rest, quiet and social simplicity,” her father tells Nickie privately. “So based on what I can see I think it’s best that you and Emily, you know, stop seeing each other for a while.” Instead, they move in together, and she runs away just as Nickie is reconnecting with his own parents.
Despite the somber plot points, the trio sounds like they throughly enjoy themselves on set. “When two people have holes in each other sometimes,” Klein said, as Maslany and Cullen stifled giggles, “that brings you together. What? Oh. Is that funny, what I’m saying?” “Just hole,” Maslany explained. In all seriousness, she was appreciative that in Klein’s script, Emily’s illness “was not a cutesy, quirky thing.” “The characters are surrounded by people who are trying to save them,” said Cullen, who was introduced to Maslany in 2011 on the set of World Without End, a Channel 4 mini-series set in 14th century England. “These two characters are not trying to save each other, they accept each other and they understand each other.”
A complex and slightly spooky modern romance, The Other Half also explores frayed parent-child relationships. Nickie’s father is emotionally distant and addresses his son with stark formality, and at first Emily seems to have a warmer relationship with her dad (she lives under his roof). Then again, Emily’s dad “does define her by her entirely illness,” Maslany said, “and what he thinks she can and can’t do.” “He’s operating in fear, isn’t he?” Cullen asked, adding that Nickie is afraid, too. “In the patriarchal society that we live in, men are told to be strong. We’re not allowed to be weak, we’re not allowed to talk about our feelings, and Nickie is somebody who is so locked in his body that he doesn’t have the vocabulary [or] the ability to share…He doesn’t really want to be on the planet, but he’s there because he feels guilt and pressure to be there for his mum.”
Even more so than John Cassavetes‘s 1974 film A Woman Under the Influence—one of Klein and Maslany’s favorites—The Other Half has an ambiguous ending. “People have reacted to it in such polar ways, really intense, different, contrasting reactions,” Cullen said. Maslany’s grandmother may have thought the ending was “so sad,” but Klein said it “means a lot to me when people say it was really hopeful because I think we together did a very good job of making sure that it was a realistic hope…not—with respect—’Hollywood hope,’ where you splash something [on the screen] that’s not true for people that are this unwell.”
