How Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan Kept Things ‘Playful’ For ‘Josephine’s’ 8-Year-Old Star Mason Reeves

In Beth de Araújo’s “Josephine,” Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan play parents attempting to keep their daughter Josephine (played by Mason Reeves) safe after she bears witness to a violent crime.

While filming the movie, Araújo, Tatum and Chan made sure to keep Reeves — in her feature film debut — safe and comfortable as she acted through the difficult, raw material.

“Luckily, we had Chan(ning) and Gemma, who are just so warm and so generous on set and always very playful between takes and constantly checking in on Mason in this really beautiful way — to the point where sometimes she was like, ‘I’m fine, it’s OK,'” Araújo told TheWrap’s Casey Loving at Sundance Film Festival, where the film premiered in the U.S. Dramatic Competition. “Some of the harder conversations, I left to just be up to her parents to explain. She wasn’t involved in any of the scenes where there’s violence, so she never beared witness.”

Araújo developed the project, which received a buzzy and warm reception after its premiere, over the course of years, with it first being selected for Sundance’s screenwriting and directing labs in 2018. Reeves said that the writer/director first talked to her about the film when she was “scouted at the farmer’s market.”

“Beth came over while I was looking at dates, and she was like, ‘Where’s your mom?'” Reeves said. “I’m like, ‘Um…’ and gave her, like — you explain it.”

“She gave me a weary look and pointed at her mom,” Araújo laughed.

Araújo put a lot of herself into “Josephine,” down to some clothing choices — she noted that a sweatshirt of Roger and Jessica Rabbit playing soccer seen on Josephine throughout the film was hand-drawn by her mother for her when she was just a child. Early into the shoot, Reeves said the cast and crew threw her a surprise party for her eighth birthday.

Tatum said that this warmth was necessary to provide a good experience for a first-time actor handling difficult material at a young age.

“I really just wanted to play,” he said. “I know that I have the most productive experience on set when I am enjoying it, even when it’s hard. You can put yourself into the scenes when it matters, and they can be tough. But I wanted her to know that, because she’s never acted before. I was probably overly communicative: ‘Hey, you know I’m gonna yell at you in the scene? Is that gonna be cool?'”

“You can’t take it back if there’s a bad experience.”

It was a sentiment shared by Araújo, Tatum and Chan, all of whom took on a parental role throughout the interview, joking with and encouraging Reeves in her answers. At the top of the interview, when everyone was asked to identify themselves for a recording, Tatum responded, “Mason Reeves, I play Mason.”

Chan mentioned a particular scene — one involving a devastating conversation between her character (Claire) and Josephine alone in a car — as an example of Reeves’ ability as a scene partner during difficult content.

“I have to say that Mason was so sensitive in to work with. I couldn’t have asked for a better scene partner, just the way she was listening and absorbing,” Chan said. “Claire is really wrestling with how much to share with her daughter, how truthful she can be, that balance of wanting to shield her but also being truthful about the danger of the world and what’s happened to her in her own past. In some ways, it was a hard scene to film, but it also didn’t feel that way because Mason was so brilliant.”

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