Making of ‘A Small Light’: Lively roundtable with 3 actresses and 3 crafts artisans [Exclusive Video Interview]
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The National Geographic eight-part limited series “A Small Light” (currently streaming on Hulu and Disney+) follows the remarkable true story of Miep Gies, a Dutch woman who risked her life to shelter Anne Frank and her extended Jewish family from the Nazis for more than two years in the early 1940s. It was filmed last year in Prague and Amsterdam, where the Franks were hidden in an area of a structure that came to be known as the Secret Annex. To celebrate the powerful Holocaust drama, check out our special 42-minute “Making of” roundtable discussion with castmates Bel Powley, Billie Boullet and Ashley Brooke as well as costume designer Matthew Simonelli, production designer Marc Homes and makeup and hair designer Davina Lamont. Watch our exclusive video panel interview above.
Powley, who portrays the heroic Gies, discusses how “Small Light” creator-writer-executive producers Tony Phelan and Joan Rater insisted that the period piece be infused with a modern edge “in hopes of making audiences connect more than you would with your average, dusty historical drama” while also honoring the wish of Gies herself that she never be put on a pedestal. “She saw herself as an ordinary woman put in an extraordinary situation who did the right thing,” Powley adds, “so I think that really was everyone’s way into this story.” She admitted to knowing “nothing” about Gies after being offered the role and set about immediately immersing herself in every bit of material she could find about Gies, including her autobiography.
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It was somewhat intimidating to Boullet to portray such a towering historical figure as Anne Frank. “Taking it on board at 17 was a big deal for me,” she admits. “I just focused on Anne’s diary and had that be my main point of research. I decided not to look at any other portrayal of Anne Frank or read Miep’s autobiography, because I didn’t want anyone else’s interpretations of her or viewpoints of her to sway me in the way that I would be Anne. I wanted to get into her mindset and the way she thought and portray that truthfully, and it took me a while to get into it.”
For her part, Brooke – who portrayed Anne’s older sister Margo – found it difficult not to have the first-hand account that Boullet had with Anne’s diary. “Margot had a diary of her own, but it was never found,” she points out. Consequently, Brooke had moistly to count on what Anne wrote about her sister. But the actress also had a secret weapon: the recorded testimony of her grandmother, who was herself a Holocaust survivor. “She was 14 when she went to the camps, and it was interesting how many parallels there were between her story and what I was researching. A lot of her account stuck with me and helped me step into the fear they felt on a day to day basis,” Brooke notes.
Simonelli, as the project’s costume designer, worked to match the more modern sensibility of the production itself with brighter and more optimistic colors in the clothing choices rather than the drab, washed-out grays of so many period dramas. “They were real people, so especially when they were in the attic, I wanted everyone to have a lane that they could lean into for their own character,” Simonelli stresses. “I wanted everybody to feel really individual…Most of what we portray takes place in this lived-in world where people are making do with what they have. They’re mending their blouses and stitching holes. But dressing with dignity, as an individual, was itself an act of resistance. We needed to show that.”
It was incumbent upon production designer Homes to make sure the structures and visuals he created to be authentic above all else. “Everything fell into place once we got the first few foundations built,” he says. “With all of the genuine dialogue and modernity with which the (characters) spoke and reacted to each other, we needed to have the design frame that kind of storytelling. Fortunately, we had a great crew to make that happen.” But it wasn’t always easy, given that Homes was working with exteriors in two cities that could not be more different architecturally – Prague being “stone and hilly” and Amsterdam “brick and flat.”
Lamont came to the project late to work on the character hair and makeup and therefore had to hit the ground running “to get up to speed with what everyone was doing,” she says. She would put her imprint where it was merited but more or less allowed the material itself to dictate her role. For instance, the women’s lipstick and eyeliner began to run out as their captivity drew on, and their appearance started to reflect that. And depicting the way skin looks when not exposed to the sun for two years required research “and it was hard to portray that part of it.” She adds, “Watching this family come out (of hiding) was one of the hardest things I’ve had to see in my career.”
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