“Can someone please tell Leo DiCaprio to move over? We cannot see Bree!”

Those are the words of Martin Scorsese during the shooting of Shutter Island, where he directed Bree Elrod (she / her) during what would prove to be only the beginning of her career. Now, the talented actress stars as the spunky and sharp Lexi in Sean Baker’s Red Rocket. If you haven’t watched the darkly funny movie yet (which was nominated at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival), don’t walk—run to theaters for a truly good laugh.

Here, the Kansas native explains how she got cast for the role, the difference between being on stage and on camera, and why smaller is sometimes better—when it comes to sets, at least.

How did you get cast for Red Rocket?
I’d been in a play in Portland that was shut down because of Covid, and I ended up staying there because the cases were so crazy in New York. I kept asking myself, “Will we ever return to live theater?” Then I got a call from Samantha Quan, who is a producer on Red Rocket. She said they were doing a passion project and that I could capture the role of Lexi. I was like, “Well what’s the part?” She said, “She’s a heroin-addicted former porn star.” And I said, “Yes, that sounds right up my alley.” [Laughing.]

Was there room for improvisation?
Yes, which was really cool. Since we shot on film, which is such an expensive medium, you can’t do 500 takes—we only had a certain amount. So the fact that Sean allowed us the freedom to do a couple of fully improvised scenes was really special. We didn’t feel so tied to the words and just let our characters find their way through it.

What was it like working on a 10-person set? Do you prefer that over larger crews?
The last film I worked on was Shutter Island, which obviously had a huge budget, so I don’t have much to compare this to. But I actually quite liked the smallness and intimacy of the crew. It certainly makes things harder because everyone has to wear a bunch of hats. If you watch the credits for this movie, you see the same names over and over because everyone was doing 14 different things. But I loved it. It felt almost like a rogue, student short film.

What was working on Shutter Island like?
It was such a wild ride because it was filmed in an old mental institution, and all of my call times were like 8 P.M., so it felt so creepy being there. I went into it saying, “I don’t really know what to do,” but I would talk to Martin throughout the process, so we formed this kind of rapport between takes. By the end of shooting, he and his first assistant director came up to me and said, “We didn’t know your talent and you were totally underused in this film, so we’d like to give your character a name so you get residuals for this.” That’s why I’m called “Female Patient” in the movie.

Did you interact with Leo DiCaprio at all?
Yeah, we exchanged a few hi’s and hello’s. Same with Mark Ruffalo. One of my favorite stories from that is, when we were filming this one scene where I’m supposed to become really unhinged, Marty was telling the crew, “Can someone please tell Leo to move over? We cannot see Bree!” [Laughing.]

You spent nearly two decades working in theater. How did it feel transitioning from stage to screen?
It’s a completely different beast, because with theater you’re doing it linearly. You start at the beginning of the story and you share it in the given amount of time. When you’re filming, you do it out of order. You could be doing the last scene on the first day. That took a different kind of brain space for me to get into, but I welcomed the challenge. And in big theaters, I’ve often been told, “Bree, you’re being a little too small. You need to reach the back of the room.” So in film, I got to be as small as I wanted to be, because the camera was going to capture everything I was experiencing without me having to heighten things.