The entire purpose of their work together in Bare was to “unravel each other,” said Paz de la Huerta of her co-star Dianna Agron. So if the two of them together on a movie poster looks a little odd—one of them a veteran of TV bubblegum Glee, the other a former punk rocker known for baring it all on-screen—that’s definitely the point.
Pausing for lunch amid the hubbub of the Tribeca Film Festival last week, de la Huerta and Agron are as unlikely lunch companions as they are co-stars. De la Huerta, in a satin cocktail dress, ordered slices of steak cooked very, very rare; Agron, dressed like the sensible temporary Londoner she is (she’s preparing to star in McQueen on the West End), had a beet salad and seltzer. Seemingly everything in their conversation came back to the huge differences between the two of them, from their wildly different teenage years to their attitudes toward the strip club where much of Bare was filmed.
“I knew that if I was going to do this film, that it had to be with somebody like her,” said Agron, whose character, Sarah, a small-town girl, strikes up a friendship with de la Huerta’s shiftless drug dealer, Pepper. “If we didn't look different enough, or if we didn't have a different charisma to these characters, it wouldn't have worked.”
Through her friendship, and eventual romance, with Pepper, Sarah is inspired by work at the local rundown strip club (filmed at a real strip club that catered primarily to truckers). Agron and de la Huerta have both had varying experiences with strip clubs but disagreed significantly on how true the film’s depiction—in which Sarah is eventually embraced by the other women—was to life. “I think it's totally unrealistic,” said de la Huerta. “Not unrealistic that someone would walk into that situation out of curiosity of living in a bum-fuck, boring town, but that the people in the club, I think, would give them a much harder time.”
Agron, who worked in disguise at the club before filming began, strongly disagreed. “When I was there and nobody knew who I was and I was dancing, whatever, not one person laid a finger on me. Not one person said anything crude to me. Not anybody.” Introduced as a Texan visiting a cousin who lived nearby, Agron drew on her ballet training to dance in “a way that’s just slightly different,” and even picked her own music:“Mezzanine" by Massive Attack and “Hey Now” by London Grammar. “You are in full control up there on the stage,” Agron says about the experience. “But at the same time, I think the longer these women are there and ... There is a kind of hopelessness. I've gone to strip clubs many times but this one is very unique.”
De la Huerta, who played a stripper in Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void, eventually conceded that the difference in her experience on that film might come down to the directors. “Natalia [Leite, Bare’s director] set a very nurturing tone for this film,” she said. “Gaspar kind of wanted to maybe see me suffer a little more.”
For all their differences, the actresses set to work bonding from the moment they arrived on set in Moriarty, New Mexico, home to 2,000 people, an addiction treatment center, and not much else. “We would take a picnic out in front of the hotel on the grass or have a beer in the parking lot or go to the club and talk to people,” said Agron. “It just forces you to be very present and the atmosphere of the town and the environment and really take that on.”
Added de la Huerta, “I remember she did something super cute. She came to my room one night. We had a nice, relaxed talk, and we talked about each other's vulnerabilities, which is very important to break down those walls. Then she slipped me a little note underneath [the door] and she goes, 'I like you.' I like you, with a heart. I was like, okay. You know?”