Neither Charli XCX nor director Julia Jackson wanted “anything to do with stunt casting” when it came to Jackson’s new feature 100 Nights Of Hero, premiering December 5. “She’s someone with integrity, who wants to do things that interest her. I’m sure she could have gone right for the mainstream. Instead, she’s been zagging when people were expecting her to zig. She’s a chameleon,” Jackson told the British Film Institute last month. The filmmaker saw that the pop star “could bring a fierceness and unknowability” to her role that Jackson “found really interesting—a look that contains multitudes.”
But as Cherry and Hero’s bond deepens, Manfred also manages to prey on Cherry’s vulnerability. After all, this is a woman who wants “to be touched,” and wonders what it’s “like to be wanted,” as she says in the trailer. To Jackson, “the sexiness of queerness and of a queer love story is that it’s all up for grabs—there’s no fixed role, nothing is taken for granted,” she explained to BFI. “Even straight people would benefit a lot from queering their relationships and looking less at fixed roles. I wanted to show it doesn’t benefit anyone—no one’s having a good time. These roles become prisons. … These are things that we’ve all felt constrained by, so I hope that that fluidity of intimacy can speak to everyone.”
(AV Club)
