JUST PLAY DEAD marks a different sort of challenge for Martin Campbell. The director, best known for GOLDENEYE, CASINO ROYALE and THE MASK OF ZORRO, is used to staging rough-and-tumble fights, car chases, fiery explosions. But JUST PLAY DEAD posits its tension around a couple whose marriage gasps its last breath in service of a wicked game of wits.
In JUST PLAY DEAD, Samuel L. Jackson plays Nick Wolfe, a career criminal whose empire looks to crumble as the feds will indict him for financial frauds within a few months. Nick's plan is to fake his own death and pocket the life insurance payout with his wife, Nora (Eva Green), whose lover Chad (Jason Fernandez) will be framed. One problem: Nora actually wants Nick dead.
But Nick didn't get to this age, wealth and notoriety by being naive. Nora didn't spend 11 years married to Nick without also knowing that he would grow wise to whatever plan she'd concoct. It's in this back-and-forth that JUST PLAY DEAD shines. These people are not "good" people but they surely don't hate each other. One moment where Nora lays in bed with her other lover, a cop, has her bemoaning that she could have any stud in bed. The trick, she says, is finding someone she can talk to.
For as much as the husband and wife cross each other, they find a sick sense of play in it. Campbell could easily toss a chessboard in the middle of the living room, if he were a worse director. It's in Jackson and Green's banter that Nick and Nora's marriage takes its last gasping breaths, a look into what qualities attracted them together and ultimately, lead them to mutual admiration and even, if I dare say it, respect. But there's no way they'll stay together. Jesus Christ, what a nightmare.
In our interview, Campbell discusses the joys of crafting this kind of marriage, the process of leaning into its gauche beachside melodrama and the fearlessness required of any actor to engage with this goofy-ass world, something that Eva Green, especially, handles with aplomb. This is a rare interview in which me saying her accent in this sounds like Katharine Hepburn and Norma Desmond by way of Jennifer Coolidge...is a compliment.
JUST PLAY DEAD is now available to watch in select theaters and on VOD.
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