AppleTV+’s upcoming show, Dark Matter, is about a physicist who gets abducted into an alternate version of his life. It’s revealed in the very first episode itself that Jason Dessen (Joel Edgerton) has been taken by an alternate version of himself. The plot, an adaptation of a novel of the same name by Blake Crouch, has the markers of a bonafide scientific thriller. Yet Jennifer Connelly, who plays Jason’s wife, Daniela, summarises the show as “a beautiful portrait marriage.”
In a Zoom interview with The Hindu, Connelly describes it as a story of “a man who is fighting to get home to the family he loves.” That this family exists in a different plane of reality altogether added another visually striking element. “I think it is a nice way of looking at a marriage and the kind of navigation of various experiences that we have,” says Connelly.
Joel Edgerton, Jennifer Connelly and Oakes Fegley attend the world premiere for the Apple TV+ series ‘Dark Matter’ in Los Angeles, California | Photo Credit: MARIO ANZUONI
As Jason runs around in these different versions of his life, he always searches for the versions of Daniela that exist alongside him. While Daniela, to whom Jason is married in his original life is a working mother, she is shown to be a successful artist who did not settle for marriage in the alternate version of Jason’s life.
This was another thing that attracted Connelly to the script — playing different versions of the same character. “It was an aspect of this show that I found intriguing and fun to think about — how she might present herself in different worlds where she had had different things that impacted her and her life experiences.”
“There are fundamental aspects of her character that stay the same. She is a warm person, a creative person. She is quite an open person and she has a connection to this guy Jason that keeps repeating itself. But then you know there are fundamental differences between the two,” she adds.
Jennifer Connelly in a still from ‘Dark Matter’
Though Connelly, who won an Academy Award for playing physicist Alicia Nash in A Beautiful Mind (2001), may have essayed similar roles before (Requiem for a Dream, Top Gun: Maverick, the TV series Snowpiercer are just some of her popular film credits) she says she approaches her characters with a fresh outlook — not burdening them, either with her experience or her current personal life.
That means she does not borrow even from her previous characters who may have found themselves in similar situations. “Even if you played the same part, you meet that material differently in a different place, personally.”
A key aspect that defines Daniela in the show is the grief she deals with. However, Connelly’s method to channelise that comes down to the broader emotions that govern us, rather than her circumstances. “It is about reaching someplace human that we all relate to.”
Joel Edgerton and Jennifer Connelly in a still from ‘Dark Matter’
“I don’t muscle it directly. I spend a lot of the time thinking about those characters and really trying to make them as real and concrete for me as possible. When I am doing a scene, I am surrendering to their experience, as opposed to consciously thinking about me if I were in that situation,” she says.
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“That’s something I love about my job; I am trying to understand someone who maybe has a very different life than I do and different circumstances.”
Dark Matter premieres globally on Apple TV+ on May 8
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