The year’s almost over, but there’s one more great indie film coming: The Novice, a sports movie that is also a horror movie, that is also a startlingly cathartic portrait of obsession. (It opens on December 17 in theaters and on demand.) This is the debut feature by Lauren Hadaway, who seems to have done the magic trick of pouring her own experience as a collegiate rower into a film while also giving it over entirely to the talents of the young actor Isabelle Fuhrman, whose physical, no-holds-barred performance as 18-year-old rookie rower Alex Dall lends The Novice its alarming power. Rowing is not a sport you see much in movies, and when you do it’s a romantic marker of a privilege (or about those who break in: see Rob Lowe, in jeans, jumping into a single scull in Oxford Blues). The Novice, which is set at a fictional northeast college, gets the ruthless grind of the sport exactly right. Hadaway stages most of her scenes in predawn chilly boathouses, and in a brutalist basement gym lined with ergometers where the team lines up to perform absolutely body-emptying feats of endurance.
Alex is an outsider to the sport, but over the course of this tidy, 90-minute film, drives herself well beyond her limits to compete for one of eight coveted spots on the varsity boat, horrifying her girlfriend (played by the actor-model Dilone) and alienating everyone around her. Fuhrman, 24, best known for playing the spooky orphan in Orphan (2009), is a find. She commits to showing the darkness behind determination, the way it can shade into self-destruction. I spoke to her about her performance—which has already earned her an Independent Spirit Award nomination—and the tests she put her body through over the course of filming.
Vogue: When you first read the script of The Novice, what made you think that this was a role that you could do?
Isabelle Fuhrman: I have my own relationship with grit and ambition, which sometimes gets a little messy, and I felt, in my bones, like I had to play this part. Also, the physicality of being able to transform myself into a rower was such an appealing idea. I taped two scenes for my audition and I wrote Lauren [Hadaway] a letter about how much I run. I had just run a relay race from Santa Monica to Las Vegas, which is like a 344 mile race, with girlfriends of mine. I ran 60 miles with a broken wrist and basically just wrote that I understand what it's like to wake up and go work out and to have three meals before noon and feel like you've had an entire day before anybody's really opened their eyes, and that I could handle the physical strain that this character would undergo.
I don't feel as if I've ever seen a portrayal of this kind of determination and obsessiveness and grit in a movie—at least not in any kind of heroic sense.
It's an anxiety-ridden movie about what it really feels like to go after something past the point of no return. Alex is the biggest hero and biggest villain of the story, and there's no external force that's pushing her to be who she is. You're rooting for her at the same time as you're begging her to stop. When it's a sport situation, it's a numbers game. There's no subjective quality to it. And that's why I think the mental health of Alex deteriorates so quickly. There’s a lot of pressure that athletes put on themselves because it's not just about being better than your competitor. It's mainly about being better than you were the day before. If you're not struggling you don't feel like you’re gaining anything. So there is this sort of masochistic attraction where physical torture is also what gets you high at the same time.
Tell me about the preparation you did for the shoot.
I rowed the entire movie. I didn't have a rowing double at all, so my preparation really began once Lauren cast me. She rolled out her old erg machine from the back of her garage at her home in Glendale, and showed me how to use it properly. The next morning, it was all systems go. I had six weeks to prepare, and so like, at 4:30 in the morning I would roll out of bed into the clothes I set out the night before and drive to Marina Del Rey and row for three hours, take a break to take a 15- minute nap and eat and then I would be back on the water for another three hours. Then I'd drive in rush hour traffic to the other side of L.A. and lift weights with the trainer so I could gain the amount of muscle that I needed to look like a rower. I learned not only to gain the muscle and reduce my body fat, but to learn how to dehydrate myself so I could look small and scrawny some days, and really muscular on others. I gained 12 pounds. I was so sore and felt so physically broken by it all—but at the same time it really, I think, helped me emotionally get to this place that I don't know if I would've been able to get to.
Did you actually pull a 2K on an erg flat out at any point during your training?
Oh, so many times. It was so many times that I have a notebook with my times. I loved seeing how much better I could do, how I crushed some workouts.
The movie was shot in Peterborough, Ontario, at a real college there (Trent University) and you were plunged into an incredibly authentic rowing world with real rowers as extras. How did you see that being built around you, and how did you adapt?
All the girls were incredibly supportive and wonderfully helpful and always were giving me tips and notes. So I just tried to absorb as much as I could, as fast as I could. I'm really hard on myself: I think I expected that I was going to show up and within a week I was going to be doing a really great job or I was going to be rowing all over the place and it was going to be easy. But this is an incredibly difficult sport. When you look at rowing, it is beautiful, but you don't know what it feels like when you're literally peeing yourself or your vision is tunneling in, or you can't even feel your legs and your heart is beating out of your chest, and you're staring at the ponytail of the girl in front of you for hours on end.
Do you think the movie changed you?
It allowed me to look at a part of myself that I didn't really like to pay attention to. I live in Los Angeles, and people here are really chill and relaxed and it’s cool not to care—and I’m not like that. I care a lot. I try really hard, and I work really hard. That's a part of myself that I think I've tried to not show as much in my life, because it's not attractive to a lot of people. When I auditioned for this role, that was the thing that got me the part. That was what Lauren liked about me. So playing this role allowed me to play with this shadow part of myself. I became friends with it—but it also felt like when I finished this movie, I closed that chapter out. Now I'm enjoying just being a sexy pace runner, enjoying myself, seeing the neighborhood. Not really busting my butt. It's a new emotional space for me to be, and it's nice to not be putting so much pressure on myself right now.
This interview has been edited and condensed.