It was interesting playing a character who’s reacting to completely new surroundings. I quite liked the idea that she came in with her fixed idea of who these people would be and then suddenly is forced to confront the fact that they are people who are grieving in the same way that she is grieving, who have suffered incredible loss in the same way that she has.
It’s a beautiful story of love and loss and human resilience – about our capacity to, after going through the most horrific chapter in human history, reinvent yourself and begin again.
At a certain point, he feels like he’s going to lose his wife if he doesn’t change, if he doesn’t do something, but that comes too late. It’s a beautiful meditation on love and on being human.
It’s a universal story of how you repair yourself and move on in life. It’s got a very redemptive message, which was very important to me.
THE AFTERMATH is set in postwar Germany in 1946. Rachael Morgan (Keira Knightley) arrives in the ruins of Hamburg in the bitter winter, to be reunited with her husband Lewis (Jason Clarke), a British colonel charged with rebuilding the shattered city. But as they set off for their new home, Rachael is stunned to discover that Lewis has made an unexpected decision: They will be sharing the grand house with its previous owners, a German widower (Alexander Skarsgård) and his troubled daughter. In this charged atmosphere, enmity and grief give way to passion and betrayal.