By Christina Radish
It’s Christmas Eve and Angela Bridges (Rachel Nichols), an ambitious young executive, is working late, before she leaves for her family’s holiday party. When she gets down to the parking garage and learns that her car won’t start, she discovers that the garage is deserted and her cell phone doesn’t get a signal underground. When Thomas (Wes Bentley), a friendly security guard, comes along and offers help, Angela nervously accepts his gesture of good will. Soon after a failed attempt to start her car, he invites her to stay and share a small Christmas dinner he’s preparing in the parking office, but she laughs it off. Quickly realizing that his dinner invitation is not optional and, if Angela wants to live to see Christmas morning, she must find a way to escape from level P2 of the parking garage.
Summit Entertainment’s suspenseful nail-biter P2 explores the fears of being trapped in a dark place and stalked by an obsessed voyeur. By staying in the office after her co-workers have all gone home, Angela suddenly finds herself in a deadly situation. Caught off guard, she nevertheless manages to match wits with one deeply disturbed and dangerous individual.
Having to be hysterical for most of the movie, 27-year-old Maine native Rachel Nichols tells MediaBlvd Magazine that it was her co-star, Wes Bentley, who really got her through the difficult film shoot. “We’re the only two actors in the film, for the most part. I’m certainly not belittling all the other people that were great in it, but for the most part, it’s just the two of us and, to do something like this, with the extraordinarily high suspense, tension and painful emotion, I needed a friend who I could trust when I was at work. I needed someone who I could tell, ‘This is really hard,’ or ‘I need you to help me with this,’ or ‘Let’s talk this through.’ And, I needed someone that, when the work was done, I could go back to the hotel with and grab a beer, even if it was eight in the morning, and release all of the demons from that day. They would build up while we were shooting, and then you couldn’t go home and go to bed. You’d sit there awake. So, Wes and I really spent a lot of time together. If I hadn’t had an actor that I got along with so well, it would have been a terrible, painful process.”
{quote_top}Bentley was drawn to playing the creepy security guard because the script was so original. “It avoided cliche,” the 29-year-old Arkansas native tells MediaBlvd Magazine. “In this genre, it’s so easy to go cliche, and that’s lazy. It seemed perfect for me because they allowed me to play. It was a tough shoot, though. We were all very type-A personalities, and all had great visions. Sometimes they clashed, but at the same time, it creates something beautiful.”
Because they are the only two leads in the film, it was necessary for Nichols and Bentley to establish a relationship for their characters, so they rehearsed the pivotal scene where their characters have Christmas Eve dinner. “We only rehearsed that scene because it is so integral to the movie,” explains Bentley. “Without that scene, there’s no relationship between us. You would just have Thomas’ obsession over Angela, which is cliche. But, with that scene comes the intricacies and nuances that make you nervous about him, or make you want to support her.”
Although Bentley doesn’t see his character as the definition of evil, he does believe that people can certainly do evil things. “You can’t judge a character. You can’t say he’s good or bad. You have to let him be the way he is. Otherwise, you do a caricature. He has his background. I can feel that and have a sense of it. I think he might have been such a compulsive liar that he doesn’t know anymore. Every psychological problem there is, he definitely has.”
Having spent a season on the television series Alias, Nichols was ready for all the physical stunts that she would have to do on the film. But, even with all of the physical demands on her for the character, she says that working with a Rottweiler was probably the scariest for her. “The running on concrete was painful, but I don’t do well with dogs. And, Rottweilers are huge with heads the size of toilet bowls. They are really gigantic and heavy. Running and knowing that dog is behind you, and fearing that he’s going to decide to go for you instead of the woman with the red ball, I had planned an escape route. I thought, ‘If he grabs the dress, or he gets too close, there’s a pipe that I can grab and swing up over.’ I really thought the dog might actually go for me, which was certainly traumatic.”
{quote_bottom}“And then, there were the handcuffs,” continues Nichols. “I didn’t really think about it when I read the script, but I’m wearing handcuffs for pretty much the whole movie. And, a lot of the time, they were behind my back, which is dangerous, as I learned when I fell. That’s the stuff you don’t think about because it’s just an element of the script. I’ll never look at a script the same way again. If there are dogs or handcuffs, I’m out.”
For Bentley, the most grueling aspect of the shoot were the nights. “It wasn’t nearly as demanding on me as it was on Rachel. For me, the nights, and letting someone evil in me, were a bit draining. But, I’m a night person, so it wasn’t that terrible. I like to play at night, so it was taking away from my night play.”
Since finishing P2, Bentley did a dark comedy, called The Last Word, with Winona Ryder, in which he plays a guy who writes suicide notes for other people. And, Nichols filmed roles in both Charlie Wilson’s War and Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2.
“I had a wonderful experience on Charlie Wilson’s War,” says Nichols. “I have an extraordinarily small part, which may or may not completely end up on the cutting room floor. But, Mike Nichols is my favorite director of all time -- my dad loved The Graduate, and I love Closer and everything in between -- and he was such a great guy. He just lived up to all the expectations that I had. So did Tom Hanks. Tom was fantastic. He’s just every bit that nice guy. My character’s name is Suzanne. I play one of the staffers in Tom’s office. Then, Sisterhood comes out next summer. And, I’m currently looking for something else.”
