Following its world premiere at the 2024 Pigeon Shrine FrightFest, the pitch-black psychological thriller CARA is set for general release in February. We spoke to the lead actors to learn more about this disturbing tale…
STARBURST: Could you tell us a little bit about your characters?
Elle O’Hara: My character is Cara Tomlinson. She is in her mid-20s. She is a only child who’s had quite a dramatic upbringing. She tried to talk about her issues, but didn’t get anywhere. That led to different issues she had growing up, and being hospitalised a few times. She has very severe panic attacks where she disassociates. She imagined things that aren’t there and conversations that haven’t happened. She’s dealing with a lot, and she’s trying to figure out how to free herself from all of that.
Johnny Vivash: I play the character John Fisk. He’s very much a serial loner who’s had a troubled and traumatic past where he’s managed to elude the police force across numerous boroughs and counties. He’s taken lives before, but managed to get away with it. He’s also had a bit of time in jail, so he’s seasoned in that way, but he’s very much of solitary predator who gets very fixated on individuals, and that’s where his transgressions with concepts of power come from and how he wants to control and own people.
What was your reaction when you first read the script?
Elle: I was quite shocked! I knew I really wanted to play a dark, angry character. I thought a lot about the character, and fell in love with it a little bit more each time. I love the fact that it doesn’t shy away from these serious issues that do go on in the world. People pretend they don’t happen, but they do. We want to have people think about how society deals with people with mental health issues, what opinions people have about abuse in lots of different forms, murder, all these things do happen.
Johnny: I went, “Oh god!” I put it down and within 20 minutes, I had a cup of tea in my hand and I was reading it again. It’s a very odd sensation returning to a script again and again and again. In particular to the last 10 pages, which are this wonderfully disturbing and beautiful set piece, which is the culmination of John’s wants and desires, and where Cara needs or wants to go within her state. It really gets under the skin. Sometimes with scripts, you can put them down, go off, and come back a day later and pick up the story. With Cara, there was a necessity to go again, because it was written brilliantly. And more power to Hayden [Hewitt, writer/director], it was giving you more and more out of each read.
Elle, how did you get into the headspace of the character?
Elle: I started by writing what I thought of the character, what I got from the script. Then I sent it to Hayden, and we ended up with a Google doc, where we’d send ideas back and forth until we had a timeline of her life. Hayden was really part of the process of bringing Cara to life. I started to visualise and get a feel for what life had been like for her since she was very young, what her relationships are with the different characters in the script. I did a lot of reading and researching about dissociation. It’s a way that a lot of us deal with stress, to almost take ourselves out of reality.
Johnny, did you have any reservations about tackling your character?
Johnny: Not necessarily reservations. I’ve played a couple of darker characters before, and sometimes they do stick around, so there’s a certain amount of exorcism that you have to do. That’s part of a growing process as an actor. You need some self-care when playing these type of roles; it’s important not to send yourself off the edge. You have to know when to leave it, when to embrace it, when to honour the truth of it, and when to put it to bed. That’s on a day-to-day basis.
Elle, how did you leave the character behind when you finished for the day?
Elle: As I was so tired, I think it was genuinely ‘get home, eat, sleep, and repeat’. Everyone was lovely on set, so it was easy to take myself out of it. With the scenes that were a little bit more intense in terms of her mental state, people were right there.
Johnny, what research did you do for Fisk?
Johnny: Well, the availability of looking into the lives of quite disturbed individuals is now very freely available. YouTube tends to be my go-to for obscure documentaries from people who have certain specialist subjects. You go down that rabbit hole and started to get some really dark places. It’s amazing to see the ability of the human spirit not only to be incredible to each other, but also act in the most depraved way to each other. You have to pack in the documentary viewing and limit your news watching as well after a while. There’s only so much you can take. Then after that, it’s cat videos.
CARA is released on digital platforms on February 17th, 2025. A limited edition Blu-ray release will follow.
