Richard Crouse

By Richard Crouse – Metro Canada

Patricia Clarkson’s new thriller, October Gale, sees her working with frequent collaborator Ruba Nadda and starring opposite Callum Keith Rennie, Tim Roth and Scott Speedman.

“Can you imagine I got to be in a film with those men?” she says. “I arrived on the set and said, ‘Oh my God Ruba I have died and gone to heaven.’ Not only are they beautiful men, physically, but if you threw all their handsomeness out the window, they’re gorgeous actors. First class, top of their game, singular actors.”

The New Orleans native, an Academy Award nominee for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Pieces of April, plays a doctor mourning the loss of her husband. For solace she retreats to a remote cottage in Georgian Bay. Her time of quiet reflection and healing is disrupted, however, by the appearance of a mysterious and seriously injured young man, played by Speedman.

October Gale is the second collaboration between Clarkson and director Ruba Nadda.

“Ruba and I are very similar gals,” Clarkson says. “We like our hair and our lipstick and our high heels. I have four older sisters and Rubba is truly like the little sister I never had. We are like family. We have a second language now. It’s kismet. I think I’m just the luckiest gal to know her and to have her so deeply in my life; in my professional life, in my personal life. I know her family now. I know her sisters. I know her parents. She knows all my friends in New York City and Los Angeles. We’re just family and yet we are able to separate all of that when we enter the workplace. We’re both workhorses. We’re very high energy, we don’t take no for an answer, we’ll fight to the death. She’s Syrian-Palestinian and I’m Southern, so watch out.”

Their first film together, Cairo Time, was the Best Reviewed Romance on Rotten Tomatoes for 2010 and soon they will begin work on a series for HBO. Clarkson says her on-set relationship with Nadda is based on respect and the director’s unique vision.

“Ruba has the courage to make films that people want to make,” she says, “the kind of movies auteurs think they’re making but she actually has the courage to do it.”

October Gale, for instance, Clarkson says, doesn’t have “a traditional thriller pace. It’s Ruba Nada pace.”