Sam Claflin, the 29-year old Brit best known as Finnick Odair in The Hunger Games, will break your heart this summer. Playing Will Traynor in the highly-anticipated adaptation of Jojo Moyes’ best-selling novel Me Before You (in theaters Friday), the actor is at once handsome and charismatic, sullen and seething, as a man who used to have it all but, due to a spinal-cord injury, is now confined to a wheelchair.

Getting inside that head, and body, was no easy feat. “It was trying to explore a character that I have absolutely no similarities with,” Claflin says. “As you can imagine, limiting my gestures to eye movements and mouth movements was quite difficult. I’m quite an open, flamboyant character myself.”

To replicate a quadriplegic physicality, Claflin held his body in a very specific position, at times tying his hands behind his back to become familiar with the limited movement. He lived for months with soreness in his neck, shoulders, lower back, and fingers. He also dropped close to 40 pounds over the course of production to represent Traynor’s muscular atrophy.

Despite those hurdles, Claflin, who himself dreamed of a professional soccer career before an ankle injury sidelined him, never loses the desirability that makes his caregiver, Louisa Clark (Emilia Clarke), fall in love with him. “I tried to be as witty as possible,” Claflin says. “If that comes across, I think it just proves that Emilia is so good that she can act in love. It was really kind of out of my hands.”

What was in his hands was understanding Traynor, a man who is grappling with whether or not to end his life. Director Thea Sharrock says it was Claflin’s innate empathy that led her to cast him. “Sam is unlike a lot of actors of his generation,” she says. “He has a humbleness that is very pure and real. The first time I met him, I felt straight away that this was someone who was really trying to tell me what he thought of Will, the character, not just trying to sell that he could do it well.” That was just an added bonus.

(source)

NEW YORK — Me Before You has something most weepy romances don’t: laughs.

Writing the film version of her 2012 novel, “it was important to keep the humor going as much as the sadder elements,” author Jojo Moyes says. The fun continued after the cameras stopped rolling, say stars Sam Claflin and Emilia Clarke, who play a paralyzed man and his affable caretaker in the drama (in theaters Friday). Some of the charismatic duo’s funniest (and most painful) on-set stories:

Using a wheelchair proved more difficult than walking. To play the quadriplegic Will, Claflin practiced using a motorized wheelchair for two months. That meant “getting used to going from Point A to B, what speed I had to go at certain moments — it’s not as easy as you’d imagine,” he says. Claflin suffered only minor scrapes on his hands (from going through doorways) and never fell out of the chair, even when shooting a scene in which Louisa (Clarke) sits on his lap as they race down a dirt road at nearly 13 miles per hour. “That was the quickest I ever got it. No seat belt,” Claflin says. Clarke adds: “Yeah, you were holding me on so bad.”

Love hurts — and not just emotionally. Clarke fractured her hip midway through the shoot. That made the film’s tear-jerking climax even more difficult, as Lou dances on the beach before Will makes a startling confession. “It was super-hard anyway, from an acting point of view, because it was the most raw that we get. Then I was in so much pain,” Clarke says. Even sitting on Claflin’s lap was an almost-Olympian feat. “They had to build a little obstacle course for me,” she says. “They got all these boxes and tried to move them so I could look like I was getting on” his chair.

One wacky wardrobe. One of Lou’s defining traits is her outrageous fashion, which Will lovingly describes as that of a “leprechaun drag queen.” Of the heart-printed blouses, butterfly hairpieces and bumblebee tights, Clarke says her least-favorite items were a striped sweater and linen trousers, which Lou wears when she grudgingly watches a movie with Will. “We’ve had a fight, so I’m kind of like, ‘Whatever, dude, I’m going to wear the most normal stuff I can find,’ ” Clarke says. “Obviously, I look mental, still.” As for what she kept: “I’ve got the tights!”

“Sam stole my doll!” Clarke pulled all kinds of pranks on Claflin, including putting fish in his socks. But the most elaborate may have been when she “framed” him for stealing a doll of her Game of Thrones character, Daenerys. “I was like, ‘What? I’ve never seen your doll,’ ” Claflin says. “She put it in my bag (when) I got in the car to go home. The next morning, there were posters all over saying, ‘Wanted: Doll Thief,’ with my image.”

She had Snow idea. Like the rest of us, Claflin is a “huge” Game of Thrones fan. “I basically kept asking, ‘Want to give me some spoilers?’ ” he says. The actor was particularly curious about the fate of Jon Snow (Kit Harington), although the Mother of Dragons says even she was in the dark: “Kit hadn’t fessed up to me yet.”

(source)

NEW YORK — To fans of HBO’s Game of Thrones,Emilia Clarke is Daenerys Targaryen, a shrewd, dragon-wielding conqueror and one of TV’s fiercest heroines.

So when Me Before You director Thea Sharrock suggested she play Louisa Clark  — a spunky, idealistic young woman who takes a job caring for a wealthy, wheelchair-bound quadriplegic (Sam Claflin) — screenwriter Jojo Moyes was understandably puzzled.

“I couldn’t see it,” says Moyes, who adapted her 2012 romantic novel for the big screen (in theaters Friday). “She was, for me, irrevocably linked to long, blond hair and dragons and looking very stern. But the moment you actually see her without the (Thrones) wig, she’s so warm and bubbly, and actually has the physical look of Louisa. It really took no time at all.”

Playing someone who shares her optimistic outlook and humor was part of the appeal to Clarke, who calls Louisa (nicknamed “Lou”) a “more innocent version” of herself.

Reading the book for the first time, “I was in love by page 3,” says Clarke, 29, teasing and laughing with her Me Before You co-star throughout an arduous day of interviews. “Lou felt like such a perfect extension of me. I just understood her, and it was that understanding that brought my excitement.”

Lou’s unbridled joy is a stark contrast to her embittered love interest, Will Traynor. The jet-setting banker has a glamorous girlfriend (Vanessa Kirby) and passion for extreme sports, until he is struck by a motorcycle and paralyzed from the neck down. When Will’s mother (Janet McTeer) hires Lou — who is supporting her working-class family — he initially goes out of his way to put her down, and the two butt heads.

At first, “he’s depressed and angry at the world, but she enters his life and isn’t afraid of the wheelchair and his quadriplegia,” says Clafin, 29, who moviegoers know best as Finnick Odair in The Hunger Games series. “He needs someone to be honest and truthful and put him in his place. Everyone’s obviously just been skirting around him and not treating him like a human, and she’s a breath of fresh air. She’s different from anyone he’s ever met.”

As their friendship grows, Lou learns that Will has decided to end his own life with assisted suicide. In a last-ditch attempt to remind him why life is worth living, she plans a series of “bucket list” excursions to a horse racetrack, opera and beach paradise, where an unexpected romance blossoms.

For Claflin, the emotional challenge far outweighed the physical ones of losing weight and making his body appear limp. “I had to kind of come to terms with why would he make this (decision),” he says. “The answer is that he’s a very determined young man and will do anything in his power to give the people around him the best. In his mind, it’s a very selfless act.”

Moyes adds: “The film asks you to think, ‘Well, what would I do if I was in the same position?’ … Anything that encourages us to think a little more and judge a little less has only got to be a good thing.”

(source)

Adapted from the bestselling novel by Jojo Moyes, Me Before You tells the story of the unexpected relationship that blossoms between a contented small town Englishwoman and the wealthy, paralyzed Londoner who hires her as his caretaker. Theater director Thea Sharrock makes her feature directorial debut with this MGM/New Line Cinema co-production.

With: Emilia Clarke, Sam Claflin, Janet McTeer, Charles Dance, Matthew Lewis and Matthew Hoffman.