On the set of the action comedy, Friel joked with journalists that it was "f--king fantastic" to be the only female on the set. "No, it’s nice because the main thing is not just being the only girl, but because it’s only a cast of three - and obviously Chaka [played by Jorma Taccone] - so it means we’re all in every scene together every day, so I’ve just made brilliant, brilliant friends. I don't know about being the only girl. I think I’ve just had to make myself a little bit more boy-sie because you get into those jokes. I didn’t know I was the first to fart," said Friel, laughing. "The boys’ll probably tell you. It was like that ketchup, I’ve never been so red in all my life."
Anna Friel Interview
Your Holly is different from the show."Slightly."
Who is she?
"If you’re going to turn a TV series into a movie, you’ve got to make sure it has all those elements and they’re going to keep it interesting. I think they wanted to have some kind of a love story involved and incest wouldn’t go down quite well in a PG-13. So no, she’s 14, I’m 31. She’s American, I’m English. I wear braids and we do have the plaid shirt and the cords. We have the old cords which are exactly the same in the beginning but as the movie goes, the cords disappear and the legs start to show because she’s 31 now, so I think she’s allowed to do it."
How does it feel to wear it day in day out?
"I was thinking that I’d get pretty bored of it but to be honest, first of all I feel quite naked, when you’re with two other men and all of a sudden, 'Okay, I have nothing to hide behind, nothing to cover, no accent to disguise.' So it’s quite vulnerable making. But then the idea of not having to go and put all the big fluffy dresses on is kind of nice. It doesn’t set you aside from the men. I can kind of be one of the boys and not have to be fussing with lashes and hair all the time. Same with costume."
When did you first come to the project?
"I’m on a show called Pushing Daisies and I’m the only person I think that I know of where the strike actually helped me, because it gave me the ability and the chance to be able to do this. They talked about me for a while but said, 'Obviously we can’t have Anna.' And I knew Avy Kaufman, the casting director, and they said, 'No, don’t be silly. She’s on the TV show.' Then when the strike happened, Brad said, 'Actually, can we get Anna? Maybe we can do it.'
It was really difficult because none of us could work and none of us were being paid. Brad said, 'Well, just come and meet me,' and I did. He said, 'Have you heard about Land of the Lost?' I was like, 'No.' I didn’t think we had it in England but then I found out that on Saturday mornings we did at some stage, but I never got to see it. It didn’t become a big hit as it did here. And he said, 'I’m going to give you the script.' And I said, 'Well, should I go and watch the TV show?' He said, 'No, no, no, because it’s different. You’ll go away thinking you have to go and dye your hair blonde and be 14 when you’re not. It’s changing a lot.' So we talked about things and I went away with my script. I’d gone skiing over Christmas and they called saying, 'Will wants to audition with you.' So I came back and went to Brad’s offices and auditioned with Will. One of the scenes that I’m actually going to do this afternoon is one of the ones I had to audition."
Which scene?
"Well, it’s three. One was shouting at the dinosaur at the end, Grumpy. Another one was, Holly’s a great translator and speaks fluent Pakuni language so she’s the only one who can actually understand Chaka. Chaka’s like [gibberish]. She’s like, 'Right, what he’s saying is that he really loves to rape apples, basically.' She gets it wrong, but gets better as she’s going. I’m kind of playing everything really straight. I’m not playing for the comedy because when you’re working with Will and Danny who are just brilliant and go off on all these improvisations, I’m trying to give them as much of just a straight Holly who’s been to Cambridge and thinks Marshall’s absolutely brilliant even though he makes the wrong decision and he’s a big of an idiot sometimes. She thinks, 'Well, he did get us back to Land of the Lost,' so I think there’s a lurking genius somewhere hidden and it’s just all his eccentricities that make him behave so strangely."
How hard is it to stay straight?
"It is quite hard but then the thing is, you realize how serious because they manage to stay straight faced most of the time. If Will goes, then you just forget about it. There was this one scene where he has to do this dance through hatching dinosaur eggs along to the chorus line. He literally sets off, we hadn’t seen it before, because he’d been doing all his coverage and we’d come back and it was on Danny and me and Jorma. He just did this silly dance. We all just went, 'Mmmm.' Yoga breathing helps, I find. I pull in certain private female muscles quite a lot. I bite the inside of my cheek, just kind of various things because if you then crack up, everyone goes around going, 'Anna!' So you don’t, but there’s a lot of times I really, really wanted to laugh. He hit me in the eye with a stone the other day and they all couldn’t stop laughing at that. Thankfully, it was a sponge one. It was made out of sponge but it still got in my eye and we had to keep going. They found that hilarious."
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Land of the Lost hits theaters on June 5, 2009.
