Imaginary unlocked a new fear for audiences: Chauncey Bear, the imaginary friend of a young girl, as we saw her family get tortured by Chauncey’s world. And it all comes to a head when her father goes on tour and her step-mother Jessica (DeWanda Wise) is confronted by her own past.
Tom Payne plays Jessica’s husband, who is in a band and incredibly supportive of Jessica’s return to her childhood home. As he is trying to do what is best for his two daughters, he has to go away and misses all the chaos that Chauncey causes. In talking with Tom Payne, he recognizes exactly the kind of man he was playing.
“I think Jessica is a very supportive wife,” Payne said. “I do think that she’s probably the breadwinner at this point. His band is kind of like mid-level successful, then they get to go out on these tours and stuff, but not wildly so. But I think there’s a lot of respect in that relationship and she thinks that it’s something that he should do. He does say, ‘I can totally bail on the tour if you need me to.’ I think fundamentally he’s been through a lot with his daughters and his previous relationship, and I think Jessica realizes that he maybe needs to take some time and go and do what he loves for a bit. She’ll keep everything together at home. But it doesn’t seem to work out that way.”
The horrors of Chauncey
“First of all, I do think talking about Chauncey, I think that this is kind of the beginning for that character,” he said. “It really seems like there is a ways for him to go. And if we get to make any more of these movies, then I feel there’s a lot more story to tell with that, which is kind of fun. But what I really enjoyed about the movie and being involved in the movie is that it’s all practical. So, there were a few different versions of Chauncey, different ones which you could change the face on. And then there were ones which were puppeteered and animatronic, which was really cool and really useful for the actors, and I think better for the audience at the end of the day.”
And Payne knows about fighting off evil. So, playing with his filmography a bit, I asked him which was the hardest to fight off: the walkers from The Walking Dead, having a serial killer for a father in Prodigal Son, or Chauncey Bear.
“Well, I think I was kind of gifted an easier circumstance with The Walking Dead and with this movie, because they’re actually in front of you. All of the walkers on The Walking Dead look like that in person,” he said. “It’s amazing. Special effects makeup. And then Chauncey. Also in Prodigal Son, it’s more emotional trauma, which is kind of harder to shake off at the end of the day. So as much as I really enjoy doing scenes with Michael Sheen on that show where he played my father, those are harder to shake off because you go through emotional scenarios in the scenes with him. And in other scenes that my character had on that show that cut pretty emotionally deep. And so those things are a bit harder to shake off, whereas you get to leave the walkers and Chancy on sets and you don’t have to feed them again until the next day.”
If you have the world of the imaginary at your fingertips
One of the things about Imaginary that was very fun to me was Chauncey Bear’s world, the idea of opening a door to wherever your imagination took you. His world (which looked like the end of the labyrinth when the Goblin King is walking around with his glass ball in Labyrinth) has stairs that lead to nowhere and everything is a little twisted, but still, the concept is fun. So I asked Payne if he could open a door to anywhere, where would it be?
“Some days it would be nice, it’s been raining in L.A. the last 24 hours, it’d be very nice to just open a door and go to an island off the coast of Thailand or in Hawaii or somewhere and just be straight onto a beach. Honestly, in L.A. it takes forever to get anywhere. So the idea of being able to just walk forward and open a door and immediately be somewhere is very attractive.”
You can also see my interview with DeWanda Wise for Imaginary here:
Imaginary is in theaters now.
(featured image: Lionsgate)
