VIDEO EXCLUSIVE: ‘Anti-Gun’ Soko On Learning To Use A Firearm For ‘Mayday’

Mayday star Soko reveals her favorite memories and biggest hurdles onset in her new uInterview.

The movie follows Anna who escapes her normal life and finds herself in a war-torn alternate dimension, where a group of women are tasked with luring men to their deaths.

Soko plays one of those women, Gert, who she calls a “tough cookie” and a “badass.”

“She’s almost like a kamikaze person who’s not afraid of anything, and super guarded, and super badass, and super violent, and not afraid of anything, and not afraid of men,” Soko told uInterview founder Erik Meers. “And then you realize that she’s like a tiny, little, vulnerable person — very loving and very compassionate — who is a great, loyal friend and is going to be a key element in helping her friends follow her dreams and meet her destiny.”

Soko said some of her favorite scenes to film were with the “so funny” Mia Goth, who played the group’s leader Marsha.

“Mia is so full-on and so method that she acts out all the rehearsal the same way she would when the cameras are rolling,” Soko said, “and she doesn’t even want to rehearse. She doesn’t even want to say the lines because she doesn’t want to waste them.

“We had one scene on the boat where she is supposed to like hand me her gun and she threw it at me and it hurt me so much cause the gun was so heavy that I cried during the scene and I was really not supposed to,” she said, adding that she wanted to cut, but pulled through. “I finished the scene and I was like mother ugh! That was really painful! But I’m sure the scene was great, so it’s fine and like whatever she needs to do to be Mia.”

“We had to obviously learn how to use guns. I’m so anti-gun in real life that that was something that was actually pretty traumatic for me. When we went to the gun thing to learn it, like Mia was so into it, Grace [Van Patten] was okay into it, Havana [Rose Liu] was a little reserved, and I was just like ‘I hate this,'”

She remembered thinking to herself, “I hate it, I hate it. I’m doing it, I’m doing it, but I’m gonna have a panic attack and I’m not going to sleep tonight because this is so violent,” she said, “And it’s so far from who I am in real life and it was really hard for me like just holding a gun.”

“And I just remember having so many nightmares about guns when I was kid,” she said, “like realizing what they were and realizing that they can take people’s lives. All my nightmares had guns in them and they were killing me, or like people killing my family. So like holding one was just very disturbing for me. But I did it regardless, and I think considering, I did okay at it. Like I made believe that I could do it.”

Soko noted that the most challenging scene to film was the final scene in the movie.

“We could only do it once because of the water pipes breaking and the whole décor flooding, so that was nerve-racking,” she said, “and that was my last scene that I shot too, and we were super late in the schedule and I think I had to fly like two hours after we were supposed to wrap or like something ridiculous, where I was just like ‘Oh my God! What if it doesn’t work, and I miss my flight, and my kid is sleeping, and I’m supposed to wake him up at 3 a.m. to go to whatever airport,’ and I was just like ‘And it’s the end of the film, and I want to hug everyone, and this might not work, and what if it doesn’t work? And it was hard.”

Mayday is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video.