Jessica Biel Talks: Home of the Brave

Jessica Biel talks about Home of the Brave

In the ensemble drama of Home of the Brave, Jessica Biel plays Iraq war veteran Vanessa Price, who comes home with an amputated hand. Her struggle to adjust to life with a disability and rifts with her loved ones reflects many veterans’ current experiences.

“I think everybody just felt like we knew we were making something important,” she said. “I didn’t know what it was going to turn out to be like. I didn’t know about anybody else’s performance. All I knew was what I was doing every day and how I felt and it just kind of felt like an excitement, a little bit of a thrilling experience because we were doing something really poignant and very timely and really, honestly, kind of important to show this aspect and this side of war. So yeah, we kind of felt it. We felt it but it’s also just work and thinking a lot about character and about performance and so we really focused on that usually. I definitely felt it but I didn’t concentrate on it. I just was really just trying to do the best performance I could.”

That said, it is not a message movie. “I think it was really important to avoid the politics. I feel like we see a lot of war films with politics, and I just didn’t really care that much to do a movie about that. I was really interested in watching people, broken people, people who experienced such traumas, coming back into this normal kind of society and dealing with it. I was interested in seeing vulnerable men, vulnerable soldiers breaking down and trying to figure out if they want to go back, if they don’t want to go back, their lives, their families. I was interested in that struggle, not about, ‘Is the war right?’ and ‘Is the war wrong?’ and ‘Should we be there or should we not be there?'”  (continued…)

In the combat scene that wounds her character, Biel is not the kick ass chick we’ve seen in Blade or Texas Chainsaw Massacre. “I thought a lot about that because I was trying to bring a balance of okay, she’s trained, she’s very smart and able and strong, but this is a situation that she could never prepare for. She’s a woman. How would I feel? How would I really feel? What would I do? Would I be calm and cool and collected or would I be freaking out? Probably be freaking out and trying to maintain protocol so that was the dynamic that I was trying to show in there, that these are people. Yes, they’re trained to kill and trained to protect and provide but when you take all the guns and fatigues away, we’re talking about like 19-20 year old people, young kids. Just kids.”

Biel wore a glove over her hand that restricted her movement the way having a prosthetic limb might. “Wearing it just sort of helped it along, helped everything, kind of like stepping into the corset for The Illusionist. It was like boom, once it was on, I was there, I was transported. Once this hand was on, it was like okay, I’m here. I’m this person again. It was so helpful for me. I wore it around on set every day, pretty much all day long. But I didn’t want to wear it too much because I didn’t want to be comfortable with it.”