In an alternate reality, “Sound of Metal” could have got rave reviews and praise for its two main actors, Dakota Johnson and Matthias Schoenaerts. In our reality, they dropped out of the film, a fairly common occurrence that happens for a multitude of different reasons, and Olivia Cooke and Riz Ahmed got all the praise.
During an all-encompassing interview with Naomi Scott for Interview Magazine, Olivia Cooke recounts how she got the role of Lou Berger, badass metal singer. “That came about because another actress had fallen out of the job. I’m the king of filling in the space,” Cooke said. “Even if I’m offered the job outright, I’m like, ‘They probably fucking want Emma Watson instead.'”
“My agent called me in a bit of a tiz, and said, ‘I want you to meet the director [Darius Marder] tomorrow, because I think the script is incredible,'” Cooke added. “I flew back from L.A. to New York to meet with him, and I read the script on the plane. Not only does it explore a culture that I was so ignorant to, but it explores codependency and addiction and it does it in this really heartfelt, nuanced way. I was crying so much that the flight attendant came by and passed me a piece of chocolate. I met Darius the next day, and I had a bit of an emotional hangover from the day before, so I just talked profusely about how I loved the script. I probably flattered him because a week later he offered me the job.”
Olivia Cooke’s latest role is in the film “Little Fish,” a sci-fi film about a world hit with a pandemic that causes rapid memory loss, but any resemblance to our current predicament is just coincidental. “We filmed it nine months before we even knew that coronavirus existed,” Cooke explains. “We were like, ‘This is so sci-fi, can you imagine if anything like this ever happened?”
