Watch the first trailer for the apocalyptic thriller, arriving on Netflix June 9.
Here’s a tale that will keep you up at night…or all the time.
“We were presented with this idea of what if something happened and no one can fall asleep?”
Peter H. Stranks/NETFLIX
director and co-writer Raso tells EW.
“Immediately I thought of thisSophie’s Choicetype scenario.
I was looking for something to ground the story in reality.
‘Awake’ also stars Shamier Anderson.Peter H. Stranks/Netflix
It occurred to me, ‘Well, what if no one could sleep except one person?
What would that would feel like?
What if that one person was one of your two kids?
What do you do?
Do you potentially sacrifice one to save the other?
‘That’swhere the bones and the juice of the story came from.”
When the script came her way, theJane the Virginactress was just as into the match as Raso.
“I was like,Oh, wow, the whole time.”
“That was so intriguing,” she says.
“Even just considering how often I have my phone in my hand it’s like a third arm.
I put myself there and I was like really blown away, truly freaked out.”
A sudden inability to sleep and no access to technology isn’t all Jill has to deal with.
As a mother, primarily, she’s someone who would do anything for her kids."
For Rodriguez, Jill’s difficult past was part of the character’s appeal.
“When I look at a project, I think to myself, can I do this?
Is there a challenge in this?
Am I finding new ways to express myself?
Are there worlds that I get to play in that I never had or would ever?”
“Jill was so much more…
There are so many different journeys that she’s going on.
There’s the personal journey and there’s this global experience.”
“Part of our research is that people handle it very, very differently,” he explains.
“So we wanted the panic, we wanted that euphoria.
People enter different stages at different times.
It’s not all very linear.
Then there was figuring out how to convey that on screen.
For Rodriguez, going method wasn’t an option at least not an intentional one.
“There can be really beneficial times to use that process,” she says.
“I feel like with this, I would just be destroyed.
We did so many night shoots that I was one hundred percent destroyed anyway.
That’s when you’re like, I’m going to use it we’re exhausted anyway.
Let’s just go.
So it worked in tandem, hand in hand, but I tried to sleep when I slept.”
“My central message in this film is that maybe the world needs a reset.
Everyone needs to stop and look at the world in a different way.
I really have a strong belief that that’s going to be led by the youth of today.
For me, that’s very much what the film was about.
Awakeopens its eyes on Netflix on June 9.
