Headlining “Black Flies”, a new film by Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, Tye Sheridan reveals a new facet of his game and he impresses alongside Sean Penn. Encounter.
From an early age, Tye Sheridan worked with the greatest. This Texas native turns at only 15 years old with Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain in The Tree of Life by Terrence Malick, which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2011.
The following year, he drove back the red carpet for Mud: On the Banks of the Mississippi by Jeff Nichols alongside Matthew McConaughey. Tye Sheridan then stood out in David Gordon Green’s Joe, a film for which he received the Marcello Mastroianni Prize for Best Male Newcomer at the Venice Film Festival.
Since then, Tye Sheridan has earned international fame by playing Cyclops in several X-Men films but also by playing for Steven Spielberg in Ready Player One. In recent years, we have seen it with Paul Schrader in The Card Counter and George Clooney in The Tender Bar.
Impressive Tye Sheridan in a shocking and intense thriller
He is now back at the age of 26 at the Cannes Film Festival for the film Black Flies by Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire, selected in official competition. The actor plays Ollie Cross, a young New York paramedic, who teams up with Rutkovsky (Sean Penn), an experienced emergency doctor. Faced with extreme violence, he discovers the risks of a job that every day shakes his certainties about life and death.
Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s film, whose plot is close to Martin Scorsese’s Open Tomb, is intended to be very dark, with a suffocating rhythm, a deafening atmosphere but also a deep humanity.
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And we can say that we discover another side of Tye Sheridan in this intense and immersive drama which makes us live a grueling experience for two hours in the chaotic environment of New York’s paramedics and emergency workers. Unlike his previous roles, the 26-year-old delivers a stunning and powerful performance.
Met in Cannes, Tye Sheridan told us that it was perhaps the “the most fragile character that[il ait] cheek” :
“I think he definitely has the most intense environment in the real world. I think as a young person having to deal with your own trauma and the death of people close to you and carrying that crushing weight all days is tough. Being inexperienced in this area, I think it’s very overwhelming. My character is very overwhelmed and becomes very fragile. To some extent, the film operates on a very psychological level for him as well. And that slowly is a kind of infernal spiral.”
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To embody this young paramedic, Tye Sheridan immersed himself in extreme preparation. With the movie in production since 2018, Black Flies took a while to get done. But this long wait allowed the actor to be efficient on the set:
“We knew we had to be able to look like real doctors in the movie. So Sean and I spent two and a half months training right before we shot the movie, shadowing real doctors, spending time in a classroom and train with them.
Since 2018, I have been going to New York with Jean-Stéphane and with the doctors. So there was a lot of training involved and we had a ton of support from many doctors in New York, including the team at Wykoff Hospital. And we had advisers on set all the time when they were performing medical procedures.”
Adapted from the novel 911 from former Harlem paramedic Shannon Burke, Black Flies also counts Katherine Waterston, Michael Pitt, Raquel Nave and Mike Tyson in its cast.
The film Black Flies does not yet have a release date in France.