Carla Gugino & Malin Akerman hung out and developed a strong mother-daughter bond for their scenes in Watchmen.
Malin Akerman, who plays Laurie Juspeczyk, aka the second Silk Spectre, in Zack Snyder's Watchmen, told Sci Fi Wire's PATRICK LEE that she spent three weeks at the beginning of the shoot getting to know co-star Carla Gugino, who plays her mother Sally Jupiter, aka the original Silk Spectre.
"We definitely just got along right away," Akerman said in a group interview at San Diego's Comic-Con International last weekend. "Like [Carla] said, we have a lot of similarities in our lives and in our families that sort of brought us even closer."
Ironically, one thing that already was close between them was age: Akerman and her movie mom are only a few years apart.
Since Sally was a superhero in the 1940s and is a septuagenarian for the bulk of the story (set in 1985), Gugino, who is not yet 40, was surprised when Snyder approached her to play the elder woman. "We have the flashback to the rape and a couple of [other] brief moments, but [not much else]. So I thought, 'That's interesting. I would think he'd want a much older actress.' And, ultimately, in a way sort of showing the passage of time and how we come from the '40s to the '80s, he ended up adding in a lot more images of her as a young woman."
Beyond their similarity in age, the two actors said they had an emotional bond that worked to their advantage when playing mother and daughter.
"There wasn't that much screen time to really establish that relationship, either," Gugino said, "but I think any daughter [would say] that their relationship with their mother [is] complicated on some level, probably like any son and their father. I mean it's just an intense, complex thing. So it was great to be able to have the chance for us to talk about all of those elements in our own lives, because it does bring things to light."
Watchmen hits theaters on March 6, 2009.
[Sally Jupiter art by James Jean.]