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Lily Sullivan and David Rysdahl join the M3GAN universe with SOULM8TE, a techno-thriller that knows the scariest thing about artificial intelligence might not be what it can do to us, but how willingly we’ll let it. Speaking with Kyle Meredith, the actors dig into the film’s collision of grief, loneliness, dependency, and desire, as Rysdahl’s grieving David becomes increasingly attached to Sullivan’s artificially created Sarah. For Sullivan, that meant approaching the lovebot through the language of constructed femininity and old-school erotic thrillers; for Rysdahl, it meant playing a painfully ordinary guy whose relationship with technology starts looking a lot like addiction. Listen above or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Rysdahl had just finished Alien: Earth when he headed to Dublin to make SOULM8TE, making AI ethics an unexpectedly recurring theme in his work. This time, though, he saw the technology through the lens of dependency. “SOULM8TE’s angle was like, this is an addiction for David,” he explains, comparing the character’s escalating relationship with Sarah to our existing dependence on phones, algorithms, pornography, and social media. The key was resisting the temptation to condemn the character himself. “I knew the audience was going to judge David. Therefore, I didn’t have to. I had to actually not judge him at all and play him as straight as possible.”
Sullivan, meanwhile, worked with a movement coach to strip human movement down and rebuild it, finding a physical language that was artificial without turning Sarah into a wind-up robot. “It was like clowning what it’s like to be a woman,” she says, describing how the character allowed her to poke at decades of manufactured Hollywood femininity. Rather than make Sarah so flawless that audiences forget what she is, Sullivan wanted the machinery to remain visible: “How much can I hold on to the silicon?” That idea became especially playful during Sarah’s mirror sequence, where Sullivan experimented with facial expressions, beauty, and seduction while director Kate Dolan simply kept the camera rolling. Beneath all the horror and dark comedy is a nastier question about what happens when, as Sullivan puts it, “consumption is more important than connection.”
Listen to Lily Sullivan and David Rysdahl talk about SOULM8TE, AI addiction, constructed femininity, shooting in Ireland, and more in the new episode above or by watching the video below. Keep up on all the latest episodes by following Kyle Meredith With… on your favorite podcast platform; plus, check out all the series on the Consequence Podcast Network.
