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09:00am ET, 17-December-04
Rossum At Heart Of Phantom's Opera
Emmy Rossum, star of the upcoming movie of Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera, told SCI FI Wire that she thrilled at the prospect of headlining such a huge production, even after working on Roland Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow.
"It was a great experience for me to be able to play this kind of character that I could really give a fresh life to," Rossum said in an interview. "It was very different, because I think every film set is different, because of the director and because of the tone of the project. But this was a lot more responsibility for me, because I was 17 going into this, and they normally don't give multimillion-dollar Hollywood musicals to unfamous 16-year-olds."
In the film, the opera-trained Rossum plays and sings the role of Christine, an ingenue in a 19th-century Paris opera house who finds herself torn between a childhood sweetheart and her mysterious mentor, the Phantom. Rossum said she attempted to create a character that would lend believability to the film's more fantastic elements. "What was really important to me was that she would be the one real center amidst all this kind of theatricality and spectacle," Rossum said. "The character had such conflicting emotion, which was great. I wanted her to be the thing the audience would really kind of grab onto and care about, and ultimately that's one of the main reasons they would care about the movie."
Rossum added that she identified with her character's compassion toward the murderous Phantom, who is ostracized from society because of his deformity. "One of my best friends was born with a cranial facial deformity, and she's had 24 operations to try to get herself to look as normal as possible," Rossum said. "It's never been anything that's frightened me or disgusted me in any way. It was something that I really related to the character about. I think that she looks at this man and really sees a very passionate, musical, caring person, somebody that she can very much relate to, somebody who she needs when she's younger and has no mentor and really grows up with him." The Phantom of the Opera opens in theaters Dec. 22.
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