Dylan Arnold‘s chilling role as Stephen in Apple TV+’s Lady in the Lake required a physical — and emotional — transformation.
During an exclusive interview with Us Weekly ahead of the Apple TV+ show’s premiere on Friday, July 19, Arnold, 30, broke down the commitment that went into bringing Stephen to life on screen.
“[I spoke with director Alma Har’el] about what Stephen would look like physically. She wanted me to lose some weight for the role — and we didn’t have a lot of time — [but] she wanted me to do it in a healthy way. So that was definitely a challenge,” Arnold recalled. “I feel like getting to that place brought the character closer to me.”
Arnold wanted to make sure that he properly portrayed the character, which started with his appearance.
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“There’s this sort of fragile element to him and feeling kind of more frail than I normally do really helped me get there. But physicality was the most important thing. And Alma introduced me to some really wonderful, incredible people who are coaches that helped me with movement and speech,” he noted. “The physicality is in my mind how I got into the mental space. There’s a sense that Stephen has of feeling trapped. So as much as I could bring that into my body, I found that it kind of opened up the rest of the world for me.”
The actor emphasized how important it was for him and for Har’el that he lost weight in a healthy way.
“When I got to Baltimore, Alma had a doctor who I met with who made sure that I was in an OK place, which I was. [They] also gave me some great literature about how to maintain it because we were filming over the course of six months and I was going back and forth,” he recalled. “So that was probably the biggest challenge [where] I would have to figure out how to keep it off that whole time. But I did a lot of my own research and tried to make sure that I wasn’t starving myself.”
Based on Laura Lippman‘s 2019 novel of the same name, Lady in the Lake is centered on the murder of a young Jewish girl and the disappearance of a Black woman, which inspires Natalie Portman‘s character, Maddie, to look into the potential connection between the cases. Arnold, meanwhile, plays an employee at a fish store who is the last person to see Tessie before the child went missing.
The first two episodes of Lady in the Lake, which are currently streaming, don’t offer too much information on Stephen except that he is a suspect in Tessie’s murder. However, the show still found subtle ways to hint at Stephen’s declining mental health, which ended with a standoff with the police. It took hard work for Arnold to channel Stephen’s emotional headspace.
“That’s something that I really appreciate about having Alma on my side, is that she really cares about her actors. She really cares about them feeling good about the work, so she led me through some great breathing exercises and physical exercises when we kind of had to get there emotionally, which is just a gift,” he noted. “You often don’t have that time with a production but she scheduled that time in order to really feel like we didn’t feel rushed.”
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Arnold pointed out that making himself feel “restricted physically” enhanced the emotional element that came with the role, adding, “It was really important for us not to psychoanalyze the character in any way and just focus on his behavior and his experiences and how they come through him in a physical way.”
To properly portray Stephen, Arnold also didn’t make any judgment calls about the character despite his sometimes questionable behavior on screen. (During the second episode, Stephen put on a gas mask while sitting in his tub with some fish.)
“I think that the simpler you can approach it is sometimes the better. I tried to just figure out what he was after and he wanted,” Arnold explained before hinting at Stephen’s obvious trauma. “We were focusing on just what happens to him and his behavior and having that describe the character as opposed to having some sort of analytical judgment about who he is.”
While Lady in the Lake is inspired by real true crime cases, Arnold didn’t allow that to box his performance in.
“It is loosely inspired by real events, but it is a work of fiction. So I think for me — I mostly focused on the material on the scripts,” Arnold told Us. “I did look [the person] up. There’s very little about him online. But I think that the character is its own character. It’s not based off that person. So I didn’t want to get trapped in trying to recreate what I thought it was supposed to be. I wanted to go in with a fresh mind.”
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Arnold also made it a priority to check in on his mental health when not filming.
“At the time I was loving what I was doing so much. That fueled me. But looking back when I reflect on things, I always think about what I could have done differently and ways I could have been better for myself. I really tried to make sure that in my downtime I was forcing myself to do other things,” he shared. “I wasn’t only focusing on this project because there’s only so much energy you can give something. And I didn’t want to overdo it.”
He continued: “To be honest, it was a very heavy space to live in. [That was] odd because that’s something that I find very funny about being an actor is somehow you can enter these really dark, intense characters and be in these really heavy scenes, but it’s still fun somehow. It’s very bizarre. But I just love the work so much that kind of helps me stay grounded.”
The first two episodes of Lady in the Lake are currently streaming on Apple TV+. New episodes will be available on Fridays.
