CULTURE

A young actress sinks teeth into a familar part

Don’t confuse Ekavi Douma for her character, Rickie, in last year’s Thessaloniki Film Festival’s surprise hit, «Still Looking for Morphine,» which opened last week in cinemas in Athens. In her first feature role (apart from two appearances in shorts), the graduate of the Theatro Technis drama school plays an 18-year-old girl, Rickie, in Yiannis Frangas’s movie about drug addiction. Where did Yiannis Frangas find you? I found Yiannis Frangas! I had finished school and was looking for work, along with a friend. We read the wanted ads and learned that he was looking for actors for his movie. It wasn’t exactly an audition; he was more interested in faces. You ended up playing the unruly Rickie. When I got the role, I had never lived away from my parents. But just before the movie shoot, I went to work in Kalamata, and for the first time in my life, I was forced to live alone. To some extent, I tried to live in Kalamata in the way that Rickie lives in the movie. Did you steal motorbikes? No, I didn’t! I did other things… I’m joking. But seriously, the people who I hung out with were somehow connected to issues in the movie. I met addicts, and that whole experience brought me nearer to their psychology. Why does an 18-year-old take drugs, then? It is a form of resistance to all the surrounding misery – they want to express their disgust at what is happening to them. Rickie steals, takes drugs, lives an independent life, but is it what she really wants? She is trapped in her own independence. What she wants so badly – her independence – is strangling her at the same time. It becomes her drug. Do you feel close to Rickie? If Rickie had not left home, she would be Ekavi. If Ekavi had left home, she would have become Rickie. We’re that close, or that far apart… Directed by Scott Hicks, starring Anthony Hopkins, Anton Yelchin, Hope Davis. Based on a Stephen King novel, a young boy befriends a middle-aged lodger and his life is changed forever.

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