A new survival thriller from Netflix, Keep Breathing, takes “In the Heights” star Melissa Barrera and drops her into Canada’s remote north, trying to hang on for her life.
“As soon as I found out about it and read the script, I was like, this is the show I’ve always wanted to do,” Barrera told Yahoo Canada. “This is what I consider a dream role for me.”
“It’s a perfectly balanced action and a lot of physical work, but also a very beautifully written and well-drawn emotional arc that drives the story. I was just dying for it and I would do anything to fight for that role.”
Melissa Barrera as Liv in episode 106 of Keep Breathing. (Ricardo Hubbs/Netflix)
“We really wanted to bring the whole world to the Canadian wilderness”
Keep Breathing follows the main character, Liv (Barrera), a lawyer from New York who has been incredibly focused on her career, but now a personal twist in her life leads her on a trip to Inuvik in the Northwest Territories. With her scheduled flight canceled and a short deadline to get there, Liv convinces two men to let her join their small plane, but they crash en route, leaving Liv to survive in the remote wasteland and we hope he finds help to get her out.
“We’ve been working on this show called Blindspot for five years, which is a very loud show, it’s a maximalist TV program, and so we never try to do the same thing twice, and we started talking about what the opposite of the show? What would be the quietest TV show on television?” co-creator Martin Gero, who was born in Switzerland but grew up in Canada, told Yahoo Canada. “We started talking about some kind of survival drama that would deal with a lot of loneliness, and also the world is just crazy right now… and Brendan [Gall] and I feel deeply grateful that we are Canadians and can retire at will to the Canadian wilderness.’
We really wanted to bring the whole world to the Canadian wilderness and have it be something restorative. So for us, this concept of a relaxed thriller started to develop where there was still going to be an urgency to the storytelling, but we could take the audience into the woods in a way that felt meditative at some points and you could feel them get refreshed after watching the show. Melissa Barrera, lead actress in Keep Breathing
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As Liv continues to be stuck, her mind begins to race and wander, the loneliness really forcing her to confront the traumas of her personal life that she has largely pushed aside.
“We were trying to push ourselves and see what kind of storytelling we could achieve… and that was really something that started to emerge, what it looks like when the character’s main obstacle is dealing with himself and his past, and deal with their own emotional baggage?” Canadian co-author Brendan Gall said.
For Barrera, being able to see Liv begin to deviate from her usual behavior while still trying to simply survive on her own in the desert was what made her interested in the character.
“That’s the interesting part, when you start to see cracks in the armor, and the beauty of how the story is told is that you can see her in flashbacks, what she’s like in life in the city, with her colleagues, with her family, with her love interest Barrera said. “She just avoids feeling anything and just focuses on work, and then she’s thrown into the situation where she’s alone, she doesn’t have to put on a mask in front of anyone.”
“You see her for the first time start to lose her temper and what that does to someone, and the high-stress situation that makes her mind start to race and think about things that you wouldn’t normally think about because she’s busy with work.”
(Left to right) Melissa Barrera as Liv, Austin Stowell as Sam in episode 101 of Keep Breathing. (Ricardo Hubbs/Netflix)
“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done”
While the emotional journey Liv goes on is huge, Melissa Barrera and the crew must also take on a huge amount of physical work while filming Keep Breathing in British Columbia.
“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” Barrera said. “I think for everybody, for the whole crew, to have to go up the mountain with the equipment and push the crane up a hill, it was just crazy what they did to get to the places that we needed.”
“I just have to react to my surroundings, we were very lucky to be able to get the places we got and it was difficult because the days were long, usually we tried to make the most of the daylight. So we’d start, sometimes they’d pick me up around 4:00 in the morning … and then we’d just shoot as much as we could all day until the sun went down, and the days are long in the summer in Canada. So sometimes we would shoot until about 10pm because it was still daylight.
For co-creators Brendan Gall and Martin Gero, Barrera’s tenacity and dedication to the project and embodying Liv’s journey truly made her the perfect fit for this character.
“Her dexterity with language is so phenomenal, but also, even more important to this piece, is her ability to hold the frame in silence and be alive in each moment as she considers a problem,” Gall said. “She’s so intensely visible in those moments, just what she’s doing with her eyes and her face, and then I’d say it’s just as important to who Melissa is as a person that she’s fearless.”
Her willingness to jump into very difficult circumstances on set and her ability to stay positive… We knew we were going to do a tough show under tough circumstances and so we knew we had to build an ensemble of people on and off camera who had joy in their hearts you and kindness and respect in our hearts, and Melissa was at the top of this group of people in terms of her approach. Brendan Gall, co-creator of Keep Breathing
Present for every scene in the series, with other actors playing significantly smaller roles, Barrera admitted that largely single-handedly handling this project made her “nervous as hell.”
“It’s a lot of responsibility and you feel a lot of pressure because you’re like, wow, I’ve just got to be the best I can be, try to be the most honest and truthful I can be to tell the story and hopefully , people won’t get sick from my face,” Barrera said.
“I tried not to think about it too much because otherwise it would be like crippling anxiety and I wouldn’t be able to do anything.”
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