ComingSoon Editor-in-Chief Tyler Treese spoke to The Girl in the Pool stars Freddie Prinze Jr. and Monica Potter about the dark thriller. The duo discussed reuniting after Head Over Heels, working with director Dakota Gorman, and more. Quiver Distribution will release the film in theaters and on digital on July 26.
“On his birthday, Tom’s life collapses when his mistress is found dead in his pool. Terrified of the consequences, and desperate to protect his family, he conceals the truth, triggering a chaotic night that threatens to unravel his perfect life,” reads the synopsis.
Tyler Treese: Freddie, in Head Over Heels, the death was faked. This death is much more real in The Girl in the Pool. Why is there a dead body every time you and Monica unite for a project?
Freddie Prinze Jr.: Look, it’s one of the things in her contract. She won’t work with me unless there’s a dead human being or perceived dead human being. It’s a difficult [stipulation], that’s why it took 23 years to find another movie for us to do together.
Monica Potter: You know what? You’re right.
Monica, you had a rom-com relationship with Freddy in the past, and this time it’s much less romantic. This relationship in The Girl in the Pool has clearly seen better days. What did you like most about getting to show a very different dynamic opposite somebody that you have worked with before?
Potter: It was almost like it felt the same, though, in a weird way. It felt like a level of trust and honesty with him, that it was like just getting back on the bike, you know, and walking in and not being worried or afraid or in my head, um, which I never am usually anyway, but, um, I just wanted to do right by him. Like I wanted to be there and do whatever he needed. And because the, he carried the, the, the load for sure.
Freddie, people find out that there’s a dead body very early on, but we don’t see exactly what happened. The movie is flashing back and forth between events. What did you like most about how The Girl in the Pool handled that core mystery and the situation that your character finds himself in?
Prinze Jr.: That’s all Dakota, the director, and our wonderful editor, who really kind of helped maintain that tension through those flashbacks and make the Hannah character feel much, much bigger than it actually was in the script. Those flashbacks weren’t scripted that way. That was all sort of her eye, her vision, and how she was wanting to break these scenes up and place those things in there.
So that tension is solely because of the two of them. They were the ones that implemented all of that. I got to see a screening of it, and it’s such a nice surprise when you’re seeing things that aren’t from the script. She had kind of told me they played with it, so I wanted to see what they’d done, and I just loved it. So that’s all credit to her.
That’s a wonderful breakthrough because it really adds so much to the story and to the film. Monica, I did wanna ask you about working with Dakota because she seems like such a promising young director. What really stood out about working with her?
Potter: Fred said this earlier, she trusted us implicitly. We were able to do what we felt. We stood by the writing, obviously. Freddie and Dakota actually wrote a lot of this, I thought.
Prinze Jr.: We did a pass. Yeah, we did a little pass.
Potter: Which made it, I think, really good. Not that it wasn’t before. I’ve been really lucky working with certain directors. She’s phenomenal. I think she thinks differently, but she also feels differently. I think that informs her thinking too, on how to do something or not, and trusting. I loved working with her. She would walk up to me, and before she would say anything, I would just look at her, and she’d go, “Okay, yep. Mm-hmm. Yep. Yeah.” We wouldn’t even talk, and then she go, “Yep, got it. You got it. Yep.” That’s how we communicated. Like telepathic.
Thanks to Freddie Prinze Jr. and Monica Potter for taking the time to speak about The Girl in the Pool.
