Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the actor behind Helena Shaw in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, shares some of the joys and wisdom from making the latest film in the adventure franchise.
As Helena Shaw, the estranged goddaughter to world-class explorer Indiana Jones, Phoebe Waller-Bridge inhabits a new kind of leading lady in the Indiana Jones franchise.
Like Marion Ravenwood, she’s complex, self-sufficient, and bold. And like Willie Scott, she’s not afraid to challenge Dr. Jones. But to Indy, she’s just “Wombat.”
“I’m excited for people to meet Helena,” Waller-Bridge tells Lucasfilm.com. “She’s a slippery fish, I’ll tell you. But she’s a lot of fun.”
Behind the scenes, Waller-Bridge was nervous stepping into the role opposite Harrison Ford. On her first day on set, Ford was busy filming a flashback sequence that would explore Indy’s capture by Nazi soldiers during the fall of Berlin in 1945. When that sequence wrapped, their first scene together leaped ahead nearly 25 years to reunite their two characters after nearly two decades apart — inside a New York City bar on the afternoon of Dr. Jones’ retirement from teaching. “It was actually our first scene [working] together. And it was quite a quiet scene,” she recalls during an interview alongside Ford. “And I said [to Harrison], ‘I feel a little nervous. If I ever do anything a bit rubbish, please tell me and I’ll do it again.’”
At one point, Ford rolled up his script and gave Waller-Bridge a playful smack in the head. “And then you went, ‘Did that help?’” she reminds her co-star. But as Ford got up to leave, he squeezed her shoulder and gave her some words of encouragement. “‘You’re doing good, kid,’” he said. “And I died.”
Taking (and giving) her punches
Over the course of their collaboration, one of the most important lessons Waller-Bridge learned from Ford was how to take a punch, as well as land one. The story calls for a number of brawls that see Helena taking it on the chin and landing her own wallops.
“Oh my gosh, I had the time of my life,” she says of the fight choreography. “The advice [Ford] gave me when I have to take a punch — ‘Imagine that I’m drunk,’ — was really useful! I’m going to take that through my life, in life and in my work.”
As for landing her own punches, “It was very, very important to me that I rehearsed not punching Harrison over and over,” she says with a laugh.
And she’s excited for people to see the story in action and discover Indy’s final adventure. “It’s such a huge staple of American cinema,” she says. “I find it very emotional and I think Harrison’s performance is so perfectly Indiana Jones and everything you want him to be. And then there’s this extra layer of profundity about what it means to be in the last chapter of his Indiana Jones story.”
Read the interview in full at the link below. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is out now!
