“Rebecca is a find,” agrees Hamm. “I’m so proud of what she’s done in the movie. She’s instinctive, intuitive with her choices. Her capacity to feel shows in her creation of this mother figure and then demonstrated further as she takes this figure through that tragedy. I think what she does is remarkable.”
“Godsend is the antithesis of everything I’ve done until now,” explains Romijn-Stamos. “I’ve gone from X-Men to Femme Fatale playing highly stylized characters – very glamorous or just outrageous characters. This gives me the chance to play someone naturalistic, someone a little more subtle and,” she laughs, “to get a ‘mommy’ haircut.” She adds, “It’s topical material, and I appreciate that it has a brain. I was also excited by the way Nick was going to make this, in that we wouldn’t be relying on heavy special effects. Because it’s all in the way we play it, it becomes organic.”
Expanding on her character, Romijn-Stamos adds: “When we meet Jessie at the beginning of the film, she’s the happiest we’ll ever see her – she’s just basking in motherhood and family. All she ever wanted in life was a family. When she loses Adam she feels that she’s lost everything. She’s completely destroyed and she really is pathological about getting her child back.”
Mark Bomback was impressed by what Romijn-Stamos brought to the challenging role. “Unlike Paul,” he says, “Jessie is much more reluctant to accept that something could be wrong with her child. Rebecca was really great about reminding me that this is a woman who’s lost her child and, even though she gets that child back through Well’s cloning, she’s a woman who has suffered a unique and awful sort of trauma. I think she carries that certain undercurrent of grief throughout her whole performance.”
For the Mephistopheles-like Dr. Richard Wells, Bomback enticed Robert De Niro to Godsend. Acclaimed as one of the finest actors of a generation, the double Oscar® winner explores the deep recesses of a man guided by his own moral compass.
“Bob is just the most fascinating actor to work with,” says Hamm of De Niro. “He applies total attention to detail and to the accuracy of his work. There’s no softness in his work, no fat. There’s not any superfluous decision making and nothing happens by chance. Working with Bob is working with thirty years of movie making. I was not just working with him; I was also learning from him. In creating his character, Dr. Richard Wells, I was fascinated by every decision he made.”
For freshman screenwriter Bomback, De Niro’s involvement was, “a dream come true. It’s remarkable to see how he approaches the character and tries to inhabit what it means to be a fertility doctor. He was interested in the text and in the character as a whole – he asked me for tons of research material and I sent him dozens and dozens of pieces. I sent him technical journals and photographs. I sent him material on people who do for a living what Richard does – namely being a fertility doctor. I sent articles about several different doctors, legitimate obstetricians and some who operate underground in much more surreptitious experiments.”
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