Patricia Arquette is at her liveliest playing the character of Peggy in the Apple TV+ show, High Desert. She plays the role of a recovering addict who turns private detective… sort of. Keeping her company on the adventure called life are Matt Dillon as her husband Denny, Weruche Opia as her ever-calm friend Carol, and the brilliant Rupert Friend as the eccentric Guru Bob. We spoke to Weruche and Rupert about how they kept up with the charismatic Patricia Arquette.
Was it easy to slip into your characters?
Rupert Friend: My character was a lot of fun to play because he sort of has this backwards arc whereby we discover that he was a smalltown news anchor, who has this existential meltdown and becomes a fake wannabe acid guru guy. It involved a bit of a leap of imagination and super-quiet late nights.
Weruche Opia: Carol is a very spiritual kind of a person… easygoing. And I think her costume is fantastic; it has been done by April Napier. The costume allows me to get into character and the clothes she wears, like the flowy gowns, very much helped define Carol. She’s a lot calmer than I am in real life.
Rupert, did you study any gurus to get an understanding of your character?
Rupert: Not related to this, but I love the documentary Wild Wild Country. I think cults are fascinating, mostly because the leader doesn’t really have to do that much. It’s the followers who do the work, they just sort of decide that someone is a guru. My favourite one is probably in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, where they all just decide that Brian is a prophet and he insists that he’s not. The guy in this show, Guru Bob, is quite happy to be thought of as a guru because, I think, in real life, he is quite dull. So having a title is probably about as much as he could hope for from life.
Patricia Arquette’s character, Peggy, has this incredible energy in the show. How do others keep up with her?
Weruche: I guess I had to keep holding on to Carol’s Zen-ness because sometimes you would feel the need to match the energy but I had to be calm… there’s the juxtaposition between their characters. I don’t know how they become friends! I think she’s like the calming essence to Peggy’s character.
Rupert: For me, it was sort of the opposite because Guru Bob just get swept up in Peggy’s Peggy-ness. And they sort of become like these two completely insane acid heads in the desert and I just wanted that to go on and on.
How long did it take to dive into this special version of Carol?
Weruche: I was allowed a lot of freedom to add to her (character). Speaking with the writers, Nancy Fichman explained that it’s based on someone she knew. The person on whom Carol is based is kind of exuberant but easygoing, nothing affects her. And so I had that as my basis but they were quite generous in allowing me to decide how I was going to manoeuvre that. And Jay Roach, the director, was also very lovely and allowed me to make the decisions I wanted for the character.
What do you want viewers to take away from the show?
Weruche: I would say that as long as there’s life, there’s hope. I enjoyed watching Peggy fail multiple times, but she is constantly trying to get back up. And I think that is what life is like. No matter how many times you mess up, no matter what’s going on, you still have to keep trying. And hopefully, you get somewhere. The message is of hope. It looks like you filmed quite a bit on location… in areas that resemble Joshua Tree.
While filming, did you notice any interesting characters?
Rupert: I always think that the desert has a very specific kind of magic to it because people think of it as somewhere where nothing can grow and nothing can live but, of course, that’s not true of anywhere. The only things that can survive there are incredibly hardy, like, obviously, the cacti and things like that. And I feel like the people that I met out there are sort of like cacti. They’re sort of incredibly hardy and resilient and a little bit eccentric. I really liked being out there. We had a really cool vibe.
