VIDEO EXCLUSIVE: Grace Van Patten Reveals How She Bonded With ‘Mayday’ Co-Stars

Mayday star Grace Van Patten reveals her favorite memories from the set in this new uInterview.

The movie follows a woman named Ana, played by Van Patten, who escapes her normal life and enters a war-torn alternate dimension, where a group of women are tasked with luring men to their deaths. Van Patten called the movie “a fantastical way to tell a coming of age story.”

“Ana is a — you meet her and she’s very broken, and fragile, and is at this very low point in her life,” the actress told uInterview founder Erik Meers, “and finds herself in this fantasy-land where she’s encountered by these strong powerful women and they give her the strength to move on with her life. And within that it’s very crazy and metaphorical. That’s like the simple version I can give you. You definitely have to watch it to understand it or not understand it, but it is a magical, magical movie.”

The magic in the film comes, in part, from the amazing cast of actresses, and Van Patten called working with them “so empowering.”

“I do remember our first, we had all kind of just met … we had our first table read, maybe our second day there, and it was the best table read I’ve ever done,” she said. “And usually those are so scary, and you’re like ‘Am I gonna get fired after this, I don’t know.’ And instead of reading it right away we all went around and just kind of told our life stories, and what we care about, and what our traumas are, and we got so vulnerable so quickly and I don’t think that would’ve happened if it wasn’t just a group of women. And I found that so beautiful and so empowering and it just set the tone for that safety throughout the whole set. We all made it so we felt safe being vulnerable and it made it such a collaborative, beautiful experience.”

The actress said her favorite scene to shoot was the dance sequence, even if it was “so weird and out there.”

“I think the message of it is really when Ana is finding her, you know, strength and becoming aware of it, and she is feeling it and basking in it, and it’s such a turning point in the film from then on,” she said of the musical number. “At that point, she really sinks her teeth into the power in almost an unhealthy way, and she has to kind of filter through that and find her own power and what power means to her as opposed to maybe these women in this fantasy land.”