"I went from Australia in August straight into rehearsals for this," she says. "We had the opening in December, and we're going to play it until the end of May. Then, hopefully, we're coming to New York next summer. We used to go there with all the Bergman plays, and I think we will this time, too. It's important to go back to the theater and go back to my roots. I felt that now, because it was five years since I did a play, that it was very good for my acting to go back and figure out what it's all about, from the beginning."
Still, August says that doesn't mean that she thinks live performing is somehow more important than her film work. "They feed each other, in a way," she says. "Every time I work in theater, I'm longing to do the movies, and when I work in films, I'm longing to do theater. Because you work in a different way when you do movies. You have to do it much smaller, and that can be good for the theater, too -- to be able to control your expressions."
There's also a world of difference, she says, between the usual movies she does in Sweden and a big-budget production like Star Wars. "The big difference is that the crew here is so small, and the shooting is not going on in three different stages -- perhaps one, if there is a studio," she laughs. "And normally we work with just one camera, and that's a big difference because you always work with many cameras when you do Star Wars."
That doesn't mean that August doesn't relish her role in the Star Wars universe and all the crazy stuff that goes with it, like sitting in a chair at Fox Studios Australia while a laser circled around her, scanning her entire body (in costume) for a possible action figure -- "You had to laugh at it -- it was weird, but fun," she says. Or like receiving "quite a lot" of fan mail, although she admits, "I'm afraid I'm quite bad at answering it. I do my best -- two or three times a year I go through all there is, and I send them back. Well, if they send stamped envelopes, I send them back -- otherwise it would cost me too much!" More than anything, though, August said she enjoyed her actual time, however fleeting, on the Star Wars sets, and still remembers her initial joy at having been cast, unexpectedly, as the matriarch of the Skywalker clan -- mother to Anakin, grandmother to Luke and Leia -- in The Phantom Menace. "Was I surprised? You bet -- I was screaming," she remembers. "It was fantastic!"
Recalling the production of Episode I, she says, "It was really wonderful just to be a part of it. I really enjoyed working with Liam Neeson very much, and of course I remember the desert scenes, because it was so hot. The thing I remember most was when we were out in the desert at three or four o'clock in the morning, and the sun would rise. It was so beautiful. I will never forget it."
And if we want to find out before May of 2002 what's been going on with Shmi Skywalker since her son left Tatooine, well, like Pernilla August, we're just going to have to keep on dreaming.
