Exclusive: Sofia Black-D’Elia Talks Playing the Hero in Viral
Its name comes from the Zika Forest of Uganda, where the virus was first isolated in 1947. Zika is related to the dengue, yellow fever, Japanese encephalitis, and West Nile viruses.
No one in the States really ever heard of it before last year when it started spreading in South America. And now… it’s here. Four cases were confirmed in Florida in the past few days, and there is no cure, or even a viable treatment. A representative from the CDC recently said that finding a Zika-carrying mosquito is like finding a needle in a haystack.
A virus is basically an insidious biological agent that reproduces inside the cells of living hosts. Shudder! When infected by a virus, a host cell is taken hostage and forced to produce many thousands of identical copies of the original at an alarming rate. That’s why viruses are so damn scary. They hide. They wait. They feed. And sometimes, they kill.
It seems almost fortuitous that the latest Blumhouse shocker, Viral, is coming out now. Since it’s poised to infect DVD players everywhere on August 2, we got the chance to sit down with one of the film’s stars, Sofia Black-D’Elia, to, um, pick her brain.
“I took this role on about two years ago, when the script was written. So this all happened before the Zika scare. But it’s suddenly topical,” she told us.
Viral is about teen sisters Emma (Sofia Black-D’Elia) and Stacey (Analeigh Tipton), who live a normal life, until their small suburban neighborhood is stricken with a mysterious parasitic germ carried by… ugh… worms. As the flu speedily spreads throughout Shadow Canyon, the girls band together and barricade themselves from infection while they hope and pray for their parents’ return. Tough choices must be made: for example, what to do about Emma’s crush, Evan (Travis Tope)? In the case of this nemesis, safety may not be in numbers… In any event, it may already be too late – when the bug enters their home, the sisters are faced with an impossible choice: protect each other or survive alone.
While there is plenty of gore in the form of larva-strewn vomitus spewed by the victims in the grip of Worm Flu, what attracted Sofia was as follows: “The fact that it’s fleshed out was really important to me and to Travis. When we got to set, to know that it’s also about their love story really added to the drama. We were all really conscious of it being about them and that you hopefully care what happens to them, which can be a rarity in movies like this.”
There’s a military presence in the movie, but it’s not just about martial law and order. “I would say that Viral more like a high school drama mixed with body horror,” Sofia said, “and I think it’s got kind of a nice comic book vibe to it, the way that it revolves around nature and the sisters and the family dynamic.”
The character and acting are more important to Sofia than you might think. She was on a soap (“All My Children”), but she is also trained in the Meisner method of acting. (The Meisner technique develops externally, as opposed to Method acting, which develops from an internal source.) She grew up in New Jersey but lives in New York, where she gets lots of great roles. You may remember her from Project Almanac, and you can look forward to seeing her in Ben-Hur.
Sofia plays the sweeter of the sisters. “Emma is kind of a shy, nerdy type with a heart of gold and who is trying to handle a move and get acclimated to this new school… and then this terrible thing happens that she has to deal with. She becomes the hero of the story.”
We asked her how Emma can be so heroic in the face of those squirmy-squishy worms. “They’re pretty scary!” she agreed. But she added there’s a system to the scares and real meat to the story. “I like how they handled the first sign of infection, and I like that the villains keep evolving and you never know where they are going to come from. Our special effects team did a good job of making the infected ones creepy and gross. But it’s an intelligent parasite; it’s not just gross. They’re connecting to each other the whole time [like a hive].”
For the record, Sofia loved working with the directing duo of Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman. “They had a big success in the Paranormal Activity franchise, and I think they are well versed in horror. And then coming from their breakout movie Catfish, there is an interest in people and developing suspense, not just a jump scare. That’s what they do – they are all about character.”
Sofia Black-D’Elia, Analeigh Tipton, Travis Tope, and Michael Kelly star in Viral, directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman. Barbara Marshall and Christopher Landon penned the script.
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