Toronto International Film Festival: Actors poised for stardom

The Toronto International Film Festival is famous for its star-studded, Oscar-caliber lineup, but it showcases films featuring stellar turns from lesser-known performers too. Before the festival’s conclusion Sunday, The Times’ film staff caught up with some of the players poised to break out of this year’s pack.

As many stars have found, it can take a small film to finally move an actor from the side to center stage. “The First Grader,” which rests heavily on Naomie Harris’ slim shoulders, may be that film for her.

The role of Teacher Jane — a headmistress in a rural Kenyan school who puts her job, her marriage and indeed her life on the line to fight for an 84-year-old’s right to an education — captivated the 34-year-old actress when she read the script, based on a true story.

And the film satisfied her desire for a smaller project; after spending much of her time in the machinery of major studio movies (the two most recent “Pirates of the Caribbean” films and “Miami Vice” among them), she wanted a break.

“I wanted to go back and do something really small, really intimate, where I felt like I could be part of the creative process. And meeting a director like Justin Chadwick, who’s always allowing you to contribute — that’s really liberating,” she said the morning after the film’s premiere. “I wanted my passion to be re-ignited, and that’s definitely what happened on this piece.”

Audiences here responded with tears, standing ovations and buzz that Harris could be an awards contender. But the beginnings of the production — when Harris had to actually teach first-graders for two weeks in Kenya before filming — were difficult, she recalled.

“It was terrifying,” she said. “I had to have the Kenyan accent, I had to come up with lesson plans, I taught them all day, which was incredibly exhausting.”

The night before shooting began, there was a celebratory dinner at a Nairobi restaurant famous for its cuisine and infamous for its hygiene. Harris got food poisoning and spent her first week on camera trying not to appear ill.

The story begins when an elderly former freedom fighter is turned away from the school. Administrators and parents don’t want him there, teenagers taunt him, codgers berate him. But each day he comes back, walking miles with his cane, demanding a chance to learn until Jane takes up his cause.

“It’s a weird thing, you sign up to do a film and you don’t know if you can find the character. I remember being in Kenya and it was a week before shooting, and I still hadn’t nailed the accent. I was having a breakdown and I kept thinking, ‘Am I ever going to get her?’ But eventually she came.

“With any great part you think, ‘I’ve bitten off more than I can chew.’ And honestly, if you don’t get that moment, then it wasn’t really stretching you.”

— Betsy Sharkey

‘Wilde’ woman

Jessica Chastain completed four years at the Juilliard School in New York and pretty much went straight into a movie based on Oscar Wilde’s “Salome” that Al Pacino directs and stars in.

“I think that’s getting training from both sides of the coin,” Chastain said of the classical education she received at the performing-arts school and the on-set experience with an improvisational personality such as Pacino.

“Wilde Salome” hasn’t been released, but the 29-year-old’s performance as Rachel Singer, a morally conflicted Nazi hunter in 1960s Berlin in John Madden’s dramatic thriller “The Debt,” caught eyes here last week.

In the movie, the Northern California native is required to engage in difficult fight scenes, shift nimbly between German and English and express a sense of remorse and moral conflict as she and her team cover up a dark secret — acting in a film with a cast that also includes veterans such as Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson and Sam Worthington. (Chastain took fight training, learned German and relied on a dance background to prepare.)

Despite landing some plum roles, Chastain has had the misfortune of starring in a few films that have hit distribution roadblocks. The Pacino movie had distribution issues, while “The Debt” was caught in the Miramax-Disney transition.

And then there’s her part in Terrence Malick’s long-delayed meditative drama “The Tree of Life.” Chastain plays Mrs. O’Brien, and Brad Pitt plays her husband. Sean Penn also stars in the film, which was shot in 2008 and is slated for release next year.

“Terry really is the last silent film director,” Chastain said of the enigmatic auteur. “When sound came along, a lot of directors began to keep the camera stationary and it became more about blocking and less about movement. But Terry is always moving, and you always have to move with him.”

Chastain wonders whether she’s been able to move among such diverse parts because some of her films have yet to come out.

“I think it’s probably for that reason that when directors meet me they don’t have a lot of baggage about me, so they allow me to play a lot of different roles,” she said, speaking from the Mississippi set of her latest project, the race-themed drama “The Help.”

Steven Zeitchik

He can relate

In “It’s Kind of a Funny Story,” Keir Gilchrist plays a high school overachiever who checks himself into a psychiatric institution after feeling overwhelmed by social and academic pressure. The 17-year-old actor — whose understated and disarming performance alongside Zach Galifianakis won raves in Toronto — can relate to the stress.

“It connected with me, being the age that I am,” Gilchrist said. “Obviously I have the unique situation because I’m acting. That’s a lot of added pressure. And then in my personal life there’s just a feeling of being alienated and lonely. I think a lot of young people have that feeling, but no one talks about it.”

The Toronto-based Gilchrist may have a few more reasons to feel overwhelmed than the average teen. He keeps up a rigorous schedule that regularly takes him from Canada to the Los Angeles set of Showtime’s “The United States of Tara,” in which he plays the prissy child of Toni Collette’s title character.

In “Funny Story,” directed by Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden, Gilchrist’s character is the center of the drama as well as the audience’s surrogate amid a group of colorful and sometimes unhinged mental patients. He particularly shines in a fantasy scene in which he belts out a rendition of Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure.”

After attending a party in Toronto celebrating the film’s world premiere and spending time hanging out with friends, Gilchrist jetted off the next day to the “Tara” set. (He recently finished high school, which should ease his schedule somewhat.)

Gilchrist’s punk-inflected style of dress and manner differ from the squarer and buttoned-down character he plays in “Funny Story.” (He prefers, for instance, a cocked ballcap and ratty T-shirts and jeans.) In fact, when he was set to meet with Focus Features executives, the film’s producers and directors suggested that he wear a dressier shirt than usual.

“I definitely agree dressing the way I usually do would not have helped me get the part,” said Gilchrist, who added that he’d like to play an “evil character” soon. “But I still get to dress however I want on the weekend.”

— Steven Zeitchik

Transformative power

It should be easy to recognize Andrea Riseborough — after all, she appeared in a trio of films that played in Toronto: “Brighton Rock,” “Never Let Me Go” and “Made in Dagenham.” Yet such is her transformative power and skill at subtle characterization in the three performances that the 28-year-old British actress can come as a complete surprise in person.

Sitting on a hotel patio, wearing a boho-hip ensemble of an oversized brown plaid jacket and patterned scarf, she pulled out a comically slim cigarette (while researching a stage role, she said, she discovered the brand is favored by Eastern European flight attendants). Her bright lilac-colored nails, she noted, were for the part she is currently filming: Wallis Simpson, the American divorcee for whom Prince Edward abdicated the throne of England, in Madonna’s directing effort “W.E.”

That’s a radical shift from “Never Let Me Go,” in which she portrays a young woman desperate to hold onto her lover as she discovers the sad truth of her existence. In “Made in Dagenham,” she is a factory worker fighting for equal pay. The biggest of the three roles is in “Brighton Rock,” Rowan Joffe’s adaptation of the Graham Green novel, as a waitress caught in a web of love, gangster intrigue and deep deception.

Although she shot all three films the same year, she didn’t hatch some grand plan to have them all play at Toronto. “I’m just really pleased the festival shares my taste,” she said.

Born in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne in the north of England, she moved to London in 2003 to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She was nominated for a British Academy of Film and Television Arts award for her title role in the 2008 TV movie “Margaret Thatcher: The Long Walk To Finchley.” She also had a part in Mike Leigh’s 2008 film “ Happy-Go-Lucky.”

Though she slimmed a bit to play Simpson, she said she didn’t gain or lose weight for the three films shown in Toronto. Though she is nearly unrecognizable from one role to the next, the distinctions came in how she carried herself or used her voice. Holding her head back, she demonstrated how she achieved her round-faced innocence in “Brighton Rock,” for example.

“I think I find it fulfilling, moving to the beat of somebody else’s drum for a while,” she said. “I don’t know what that is in me, whether it’s escapism or whether it’s nosiness or some kind of voyeurism or fascination or addiction. I’m not sure what it is, but I find it very interesting.”

Mark Olsen