We talk to Mr. Robot star Martin Wallström about his role in the new science-fiction thriller, Parallel
Martin Wallström is best known to American audiences as determined businessman Tyrell Wellick on the television series Mr. Robot. After two decades of film wok in his native Sweden,
Wallström is co-starring in the new science fiction film, Parallel. Wallström plays Noel, an ambitious app designer who, along with his friends, discovers a mirror that leads to an infantine number of alternate universes. With information from other universes at their fingertips, Noel looks to take advantage of their discovery. Wallström is joined on this multiverse adventure by Georgia King, Mark O’Brien, and Aml Ameen.
After being approached for the project, Wallström found there were comparisons to be made between the characters of Noel and Mr. Robot’s Tyrell, but he was drawn to the differences in their trajectory. “There are parallels, but there is a very broad arc for Noel,” says Wallström. “I think the difference is that when you meet Tyrell, he’s in the middle of his working on his dream and working his way up the ladder, but with Noel, he’s an average guy trying to make ends meet with his company. Then he suddenly stumbles across Pandora’s Box, and he can have everything he ever wanted. That change happened so much quicker for him. With Tyrell, it was four or five episodes into the first season of Mr. Robot before he begins to spiral. Whereas with Noel, you get the transformation much quicker and you get you to see more of the back story, which I liked.”
With a character arc as broad as Noel’s, Wallström had to approach his performance carefully. “When I looked at the script, Noel has this large arc and it has to be connected together, but when you don’t shoot anything in order, you have to work that out backward. You lay one piece of the puzzle down and then you have to lay the other. You have to remind yourself, ‘OK if I do this now it will affect that scene,’ and sometimes you realize, ‘If I did that, then I can’t do this.’ That what I like about this story. It’s more of a mathematical problem to solve.”
While Parallel is at its core a drama, it blends other genres like science fiction and horror as well, but Wallström says they left those elements to director Isaac Ezban. “When we met with Isaac and [cinematographer] Karim [Hussain], they made it clear that we could just play to the drama,” says Wallström. We left everything else to them. Before filming, I didn’t know Georgia, Mark, or Aml, but they are all excellent writers and directors, so after the first table read, we sat down and started working on the characters. [Screenwriter] Scott [Blaszak] was very generous with letting us be involved. I learned so much from other actors when we worked on this piece together. It was almost like being at school.”
As an actor coming from Sweden to North America, Wallström has found significant differences in the medium. “It’s taken a while to understand why I enjoy it so much here, and I think one part of it is it in the storytelling, says Wallström. In the American or even British way of telling a story, you’re allowing it to have a heightened drama and be really larger than life, where I come from in Sweden, that doesn’t work. If you look at a film like the original Swedish version of Let the Right One In, it works because it’s still very down to Earth. It took me a couple of years for me to understand that I was drawn to that type of material that you can do here. It’s very hard to do that kind of film in Sweden. If you take the character like Tyrell or Noel, they just won’t work in Sweden because people wouldn’t take them seriously. It’s high drama but that’s what I like about it.”
While having access to a doorway to the multiverse may sound tempting, Wallström would be tread cautiously. “Be careful what you wish for,” he says. “That’s why the lottery exists. People become millionaires without doing anything, which is the opposite of hard work and getting things the hard way.”
Parallel is available on VOD on December 11, 2020.