Tron: Ares: Greta Lee’s ‘Trailer Moment’ Took Some Serious Arm Strength
What's the secret to looking cool on-screen? Three takes, a heavy cloth, and a lot of arm strength.
In Tron: Ares, Korean American actress Greta Lee has one of those deceptively simple scenes that end up defining a movie. It’s not an explosion or a chase — just a reveal that lasts merely a few seconds.
Tron: Ares is the third chapter in Disney’s cyberwar saga, that began with 1982’s Tron and 2010’s Tron: Legacy.
In the sequel, Jared Leto stars as the title character, a digital being who can travel between the digital and real worlds. But here’s the thing: Ares can’t stay in the real world for longer than 29 minutes.
There lies a big problem for his creator Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters) who has a long line of buyers waiting for his revolutionary technology that can reproduce virtual entities into actual physical ones — think a kind of 3D printer on anabolic steroids.
Lee plays Eve Kim, a competitor of Dillinger’s, who has the key to correcting Ares’s ephemeral defect. With billions of dollars at stake, Dillinger dispatches Ares to recover the code, and he only has — you guessed it — 29 minutes to accomplish the mission. And let the chase begin, with Nine Inch Nails’ throbbing industrial score cranked up to 11.
In the ensuing pursuit, Eve, of course, gets to be on a light cycle, a vital component of the Tron franchise. She also gets to ride a motorcycle. But the cool part arrives before she strides up to the bike — when Eve grabs hold of the cover, and with one clean motion, pulls it away.
It’s a badass moment not unlike the one where Tom Cruise reveals his Kawasaki in Top Gun: Maverick. (Coincidentally, Maverick director Joseph Kosinski was behind Tron: Legacy.)
On screen, it looks like pure confidence. In reality, it took muscle, patience, and three takes.
“Three,” the Past Lives and The Morning Show actress speaking to 8days.sg via Zoom from Seoul during the Asian leg of the Tron Ares promo tour.
“I remember it was three takes. That moment was so important for [director] Joacim [Rønning]. He liked to put the pressure on me by saying things like ‘trailer moment.’ And so we knew from the beginning that this was important, and I couldn’t mess it up.”
It wasn’t the kind of challenge anyone expected. “Listen,” she said, “uncovering a bike like that — there are a lot of unforeseen challenges. It’s a big, heavy piece of cloth, and there’s a lot of things it can get hooked on to. You have to use a lot of arm strength for that one.”
Run, Greta, Run: Tron: Ares isn’t entirely SFX driven — especially when it came to Lee’s action sequences. “The director and I didn’t realise how much running I’d have to do,” she told The Korea Herald. The six-week night shoot required her to race through the Vancouver streets until 1am. She joked: “Olympic athletes don’t have to do 20 takes running like their life depended on it.”
Watch our full interview (only five minutes lah) with Lee, who’s also appearing on Apple TV+’s Emmy-winning The Morning Show and in Kathryn Bigelow’s upcoming Netflix thriller A House of Dynamite (out Oct 24). She’s also expected to start soon on her directorial debut, The Eyes Are The Best Part, an adaptation of Monika Kim’s psychological horror novel about the making of a female serial killer.
Tron: Ares (PG13) is now in cinemas. Watch exclusive 8days.sg interviews on meWATCH and Mediacorp YouTube Channel.
Photos: Disney
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