De Leon with the late Charlbi Dean (left) and Vicki Berlin in Neon’s Triangle of Sadness
Neon / Courtesy Everett Collection
Dolly de Leon had to be convinced to audition for Triangle of Sadness, the Palme d’Or-winning comedy directed by Ruben Östlund, which has earned her rave reviews. She had been grinding away at auditions for commercials in her native Philippines, booking about 45 percent of the jobs and feeling hopeless about her career. “I just thought, ‘No one ever chooses me, so I’ll just go and have fun with it,’ ” she says of her approach to each gig. The attitude ended up serving her well.
As Abigail — a worker on the cleaning staff of a luxury yacht, who starts leading the same people who looked down on her when a pirate attack leaves them marooned on a remote beach — de Leon balances deft comedy, visceral anger and potent sensuality, and the 53-year-old actress has become one of the breakout stars of the fall movie season.
First, however, she had to wait two years between auditioning for the role in 2018 and filming in 2020. During that period, she was “always” thinking about Abigail. She exercised on a treadmill to keep her stamina up for what she knew would be an intense filming process. She also started working on Abigail’s backstory. “I only do that with characters who are very, very different from me, and especially characters who make a very difficult choice,” she explains. She kept that story — of Abigail’s childhood spent by the water and her painful experiences with men — in a loose-leaf journal, and continued adapting it while filming in Greece.
Still, de Leon didn’t feel she needed to do much research into Abigail’s position in society. It was a character she fundamentally recognized. “I see Abigail in my aunts, my mother, our grandmother, our cousins,” she says. “She’s in a lot of Filipinos that I’ve met over the years.”
In Greece, de Leon endured physical and mental tests. For one sequence, she had to swim a 40-foot distance with rocks in her pocket so she wouldn’t be seen by cameras above the surface. She was incredibly nervous about performing the film’s final scene, which has been debated by audiences since its Cannes premiere. At the last minute, Östlund asked her to add more nuance to Abigail’s potentially murderous actions. “I discovered so many things about myself working with him that really helped me grow a lot as an actor,” she says.
At the time of this interview, de Leon was preparing to leave Los Angeles for her hometown of Manila and looking forward to seeing her kids. (She’s a mother of four — three of them adults, and the youngest just 9.)
She’s eager to explore opportunities outside her country. “In the Philippines, I’ve been living in a box,” she says. “It’s very formulaic, the way everything’s done in the Philippines. I want to break out of that.” She wants to do indies and work with filmmakers who challenge her. She teases that she’s playing Jason Schwartzman’s stepmother in a comedy.
Even with this potential in front of her, she wants to go back to the mindset she had when auditioning for Abigail. “I try to put myself in that place again, where I focus on the character and on the story rather than on the need to be hired,” she says. “Because that’s really my job, to be a storyteller.”
This story first appeared in a December stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.