Los Angeles-based Turkish actress Cemre Paksoy — who is known in her country for roles in hit series “The Affair” and Netflix’s “As the Crow Flies” — is breaking new ground by playing Eleni Sadik, the lead in erotic thriller “Night Nurse,” whom she calls “a strange woman with a tendency for perversion.”
“Night Nurse,” which premiered in the NEXT section at Sundance Film Festival in January, marks the directorial debut of Georgia Bernstein. The indie movie is set in a luxury retirement community where Eleni is hired to take care of an enigmatic elderly patient, played by Bruce McKenzie (“House,” “Breaking Bad”). He draws her into perpetrating a series of phone scams as they become increasingly intimate and “the line blurs between care and desire, devotion and delusion,” as the film’s synopsis puts it.
Mimi Rogers (“Ginger Snaps”) rounds out the “Night Nurse” cast playing Dr. Mann, who oversees the increasingly disrupted Midwest retirement community where this twisted tale takes place.
Independent Film Company (formerly known as IFC Films) will release “Night Nurse” in U.S. theaters on July 10.
Below, Paksoy speaks to Variety about playing the protagonist in “Night Nurse” and how she and Bernstein drew on French feminist auteur Catherine Breillat’s work and Isabelle Huppert’s tour de force performance in Michael Haneke’s “The Piano Teacher” for inspiration.
Georgia and I are very close friends. We met the first day of college. When she told me she was writing a role for me, I would have said yes, no matter what. But when I read the script, I felt like it was the perfect role for me. There’s this joke that I sometimes tell, which is that every little girl’s dream is to grow up and play a strange woman with a tendency for perversion. It’s only half a joke for me, because I think that I did dream of that. So, in that sense, it felt like a dream role.
There’s actually another part to this story, which is that when Georgia told me that she was writing the script and putting this movie together, I was living in Istanbul. I didn’t have my artist visa yet. And, as if making an independent film isn’t hard enough, Georgia worked really hard to put my visa application through with me. If anyone has ever applied for a visa, they know how effortful and time-consuming that is, let alone in the middle of pre-production. I told her multiple times that she should do some casting outreach and figure out a plan B because we were a month out from filming, and we still did not have my visa approval yet. But she refused. She said she wouldn’t do it with anyone else, which I find very moving.
What’s interesting to me is that the movie isn’t really about what it’s like to be a nurse. Nurses are a sort of vehicle to explain the compulsive nature of caregiving and the obsession that we have with it in our personal and romantic relationships; how we can lose ourselves in these [types of] relationships. Which I think is a sort of primal — and not always pleasant — thing to admit, but it’s a relatable feeling to me. The other thing that really excited me about this role is that it’s a really fresh take on erotic thrillers. I think the question of how erotic thrillers can exist in contemporary culture is very interesting. Because what does an erotic thriller look like in a world where everything is permissible, everything is accessible? You can find sex, violence or really anything online. We’re exposed to so much. So what’s even transgressive anymore? I was really drawn to the eroticism in this movie — and the eroticism in my character — because it’s coming from desire and desperation, more than from consummation. And those emotions, I think, are very cinematic.
She actually gave me a lot of “homework movies” to watch as references. Maybe they won’t surprise you. They included Catherine Breillat movies like “Dirty Like an Angel” and “36 Fillette” (“Virgin”), where a young woman becomes entangled with a shady older man and the power dynamics are either unclear or shifting. Those movies really helped frame the relationship between my character and Bruce McKenzie’s character, Douglas. What I think is really cool and special about those movies is that Catherine Breillat shows young women having power within the sort of dynamics in which traditionally you would assume the man is having power. That aside, for my performance, specifically, I was really inspired by Sissy Spacek in Robert Altman’s “3 Women” and Isabelle Huppert in “The Piano Teacher,” two of my favorite performances of all time. Those movies, similarly to “Night Nurse,” made me think that prudes, perhaps, make the best perverts.
No, I definitely didn’t feel any sort of fear around that. I think the movie is really special. Its point of view is clear. I haven’t really thought about it, and I hope that “Night Nurse” gets seen around the world.
I’d like to work with other auteur directors and build on those relationships, and just be in projects where the film really has its own world and a unique point of view. Georgia and I are writing another erotic thriller together in the same vein as “Night Nurse.” It’s definitely a modern take on the genre, focused on restraint and yearning. So that’s been really exciting to work on.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.