Jurnee Smollett and Allison Janney team up to rescue an abducted child in Lou trailer
In the Netflix action-thriller Lou (see the trailer exclusively above), Jurnee Smollett plays a mother named Hannah, whose landlady is Allison Janney's titular loner. When Hannah's daughter (Ridely Asha Bateman) is abducted by Smollett's character's abusive ex-boyfriend, portrayed by Logan Marshall-Green, the two women team up to get the child back.
"Hannah is a young woman who lives on a property owned by Lou with her daughter," says Smollett, who, along with Janney, is also an executive producer on the film. "My daughter's kidnapped in the middle of the night during a rainstorm, and I need the help of Lou to help me track down her kidnapper, and get her back. These women must go on this quest to get Hannah's daughter back, but while doing that, they must confront the power that the past has over them."
"Without giving it away, what I like to say is [I play] an enigmatic older woman who lives on the San Juan islands and rents a trailer on the property to a single mom," says Janney. "Everyone kind of gives Lou a wide berth. She's not very personable. She's got a sense of humor, but she's a woman of few words, and I think she's kind of a scary figure in town."
While we won't say too much about Janney's titular character either, we can reveal that the actress had to do a lot of physical training for the movie.
"I worked with this guy Daniel Bernhardt, who is a stunt choreographer and actor, and I worked out with him for three hours a day," says the actress. "[When] he said 'three hours,' I was like, 'Whaaat? I can't work out for three hours! What are you talking about?' I was like, 'Oh my God, maybe I can't do this; this is not me.' I work out maybe two or three times a week for an hour. The time would fly by, though, because we'd break it up. The other stunt guys would be working out with us, and then we'd practice the moves; you're learning how to do a fake punch and how to take a fake punch and all that stuff which was super interesting to me."
Smollett, meanwhile, was undertaking a very different kind of preparation.
"I did a lot of research into certain aspects of Hannah's life, particularly the domestic violence aspect of it," says the actress. "I went and spent a lot of time at the Jenesse Center (a nonprofit domestic violence intervention and prevention organization) run by the legendary Karen Earl. She was amazing because she gave me such access to the facility and [arranged for me] to interview some of the survivors of domestic violence and some of the lawyers and counselors and social workers there, who are truly doing God's work."
As the movie's trailer suggests, Smollett and Janney's heroines get really muddy throughout director Anna Foerster's film as they track Marshall-Green's character through a storm-lashed wilderness. So was that real mud coating the two stars or was some sort of "Hollywood mud" being applied to them?
"[It's] actually mud, but then there are certain places, like around your eyes, that they make a special mud, so you don't get an infection," says Smollett with a laugh. "Also, the director, Anna, was very specific about the color of the mud, the way the mud would photograph when it dried. So, yeah, when we fall in the mud, that's mud, but then you've got to match the mud for all of the scenes after with Hollywood mud. The mud is a character in itself!"
Lou is written by Maggie Cohn and Jack Stanley, and produced by Bad Robot's J.J. Abrams, Hannah Minghella, and Jon Cohen.
Lou launches on Netflix Sept. 23.
Exclusively watch the trailer for Lou above and see first-look images from the film above and below.
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