The actors also benefited from talks with Knight - “out of makeup,” Cruz said. … And then you look at other people’s statements … and you read as much as you can, and you try to pull all the facts together. … You look at various statements and see what are the inconsistencies and what are the consistencies. You have to decipher information and put it together. “I mean, I understand his motivation but it was really sick the way he went about it.”Ĭruz went through court records, police and news reports, all the while knowing “you can’t really believe what says, because he lies a lot. “The hardest part was trying to understand him,” Cruz said. While Manning was at least a sympathetic character in Cleveland Abduction, Cruz had to find his way into the head of someone whose actions would seem incomprehensible to most people. … Something bigger, bigger forces, were at work to keep her going.” Those forces, Manning said, very much included Knight’s determination to see her son again - although, as the movie indicates, her long separation did not lead to a happy reunion. She was especially taken with the way Knight could at times stand up to Castro, that “she wasn’t just a victim. … It made me very sad, but it was therapeutic. But have you ever been chained up for 11 years, not seeing the sun, not being able to shower, not having proper food? No, no. “We have bills to pay, and families, and that’s important. “We have what we think are problems,” she said. … It was go, go, go and … I just did that scene that was horrific and I’m going into the next one.”Īt the same time, the nature of the piece proved life-changing for Manning. So normally, when you can take 15 minutes to sit down in your trailer and prepare for the next scene - there was never that moment. “I worked every day,” Manning said, “and I’m pretty much in every frame of the film, which I’ve never had. Just getting through scenes could be hard. “I can’t even express to you how uncomfortable the situation was.” And Cruz, she said, “played his role so well that he scared me.” Manning still sounded shaken about her time in a rig she said was exactly like the one Castro had used to hold Knight. Sometimes the terrors in a work are hard to shake.Ĭruz said that as an actor “you always have residue” from your performance when off-camera, and that in this case he was playing a real-life monster, a “very disturbing … complete control freak.” He had undergone a difficult physical transformation for the part, putting on 28 pounds in the two weeks between the end of Major Crimes’ season and the beginning of Cleveland Abduction to more closely resemble Castro. Manning, also active in music, points proudly to a pop-star-movie double play, appearing in both 8 Mile with Eminem and Crossroads with Britney Spears other credits include Hustle & Flow with Cleveland’s Terrence Howard.īut the grueling nature of many scenes shot in December in Cleveland, and the subject matter, meant this was not easy for either actor. Both right now are ensemble actors - Cruz on TNT’s Major Crimes, Manning as Pennsatucky on Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black - with extensive resumes as supporting players.Ĭruz was also the terrifying Tuco on Breaking Bad (and made a surprise return in the role on Better Call Saul). To be sure, this is a high-profile project for both Manning and Cruz. “I said, ‘Mom, all survived.’ This shows their courage, their strength. Castro’s torture is both physical and emotional, the latter sometimes more awful than the former. Some viewers may recoil from the movie’s depiction of Castro’s deeds - painful to watch, though Knight’s book portrays even more pervasive and terrible acts. May 2, it stars Manning as Knight and Raymond Cruz as Castro. The movie is Cleveland Abduction, based on Michelle Knight’s book about the years of horror that Ariel Castro inflicted on her, Gina DeJesus and Amanda Berry. Taryn Manning remembers calling her mother to say she was being cast as the star of a new TV movie, a big step for the actress.
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