With two Oscar nominations under her belt — for “Blue Jasmine” and this year for her terrific performance in “The Shape Of Water” — Sally Hawkins could walk away on Sunday with a golden statue for her mantle. Her work is astonishing in Guillermo del Toro‘s wondrous romantic fantasy, even more because she does it all without saying a word. It’s a huge ask of an actor, but the director knew he had the perfect vehicle for his film.
Speaking with Little White Lies, del Toro revealed the three movies where the talent on display by Hawkins confirmed she was the right choice for “The Shape Of Water.”
“The three key movies for me were… Actually, the first one is not a movie. I saw the series ‘Fingersmith,’ the BBC series, which is remarkable. She falls in love with a woman and they have beautiful loving sex, and I thought, I love the way she did it. There was no titillation. There was no sparkle in the eye. It’s just that she likes to have sex with a woman, and that’s the way it is. It’s a piece of character, it’s not the point. I love that. And I love the way she handled it,” he said. “I didn’t want to do a bestiality movie that was perversion and schoolyard gossipy salivation. They just love each other. It doesn’t matter that he’s an amphibian man or any iteration of the other. The important thing is that they fall in love and they make love. Period.”
“Then I saw her in ‘Happy-Go-Lucky‘ and I thought she can achieve this state of grace. She is blissful, but alive,” he continued. “Then I saw her in Richard Ayoade’s ‘Submarine,’ where she’s a secondary character. The way I cast actors is not through the way he or she delivers lines, it’s the way he or she listens to the lines being spoken by others. Or by the way they look at the the other actor. I just thought, this is it. If I create a great creature and she looks at it like a man in a rubber suit, the film dies. If she looks at it like a creature, it lives. She had such a massive crush on the creature. For real. Sally, not the character.”
del Toro’s words are a lovely tribute to Hawkins’ tremendous talent. She truly helps sell the gorgeous high-wire of “The Shape Of Water,” which truly is one of the best movies of 2017.