Photography courtesy of Netflix

Lucy Fry Talks Screwing Up Netflix’s $100 Million Movie

And how Bright is *kind* of like Zootopia.

Date December 21, 2017

What’s it like play a lead Netflix’s most expensive movie ever, among Hollywood’s biggest names? When Lucy Fry made the trip to Toronto to promote Bright—the streaming service’s new alternate universe buddy cop flick—this was the first question I asked.

“It’s Netflix’s first big budget movie,” says Fry, the 25-year-old Australian actress who stars in Bright alongside Will Smith and Joel Edgerton, “and every day I thought I was going to screw up and ruin the $100 million movie.”

Thankfully, the bright-eyed up and comer says she thinks she “managed to not ruin it.”

We’ll have to wait until Dec. 22 when the film comes out to make that call, but talking with her, it’s hard to believe Fry could ruin anything. In the film, Fry plays Tikka: an Elf who’s skirting the line between good and evil. Tikka is taken into the custody of LAPD officers Daryl Ward (Smith) and Nick Jakoby (Edgerton), who discover that the powerful Elf is in possession of a rare magic wand—and that in the wrong hands, this enchanted artefact could become a world-threatening weapon. It’s not exactly a documentary.

But that doesn’t mean Bright doesn’t tackle real world issues. Ward is a human and Jakoby is an Orc, and historically, Elves, Orcs and humans have not gotten along. There’s a power dynamic between the species the feels all too real. “There’s an Elf town that looks a bit like Beverly Hills,” Fry says, which seems like a subtle way to describe Elves as the privileged class. “The humans are like humans today; regular middle class people. Orcs are the oppressed species.”

Between the buddy cop plot and clever portrayal of classism, Bright sounds a lot like an IRL, big-budget action version of the animated film, Zootopia (only, you know, with more guns.) When I make this comparison, Fry giggles—a lot.

“I love Zootopia! And David Ayer [the director of Bright] loves Zootopia!” she says, affirming my clever assessment of a film I’ve never actually seen. “I mean it’s totally different—but we’re talking about corruption and taking advantage of a system and keeping other people oppressed. The Lion [in Zootopia] totally reminds me of the corrupt cops [in Bright]. It’s probably not a connection that most people would make. People say it’s like End of Watch or Training Day, but the metaphor in it through the different species is sort of like Zootopia.”

It seems fairly obvious that the social hierarchy of these different species represents modern class structure. With all these mythical metaphors, what exactly does the magic wand represent?

“I always thought of it as inner power,” Fry says. “As an actor, you always try to make it personal; you need to have something you want to fight for and protect. So I always thought of it as your freedom or empowerment, and you need to make sure that doesn’t end up in a force that’s destructive—whether it’s internally or externally.”

And what would Fry wish for if she had a real magic wand?

“It’s a hard question because there’s so much to fix. If you could just wave the wand and make humans realize that we’re all equal and that we’re all the same. That’s a big part of the film—all these different species, and the friendship between the human, the Orc and the Elf. There’s this little trio in the car, and from all their different perspectives and pasts, they get united in this chase. It shows that we’re all the same.”

Bright will be released on Netflix on Friday, December 22.