TIFF press conference: Quarantined in North Bay, Penguin Bloom's Naomi Watts talks bird poop, wheelchairs and personal struggle

By Jim Slotek

A commitment to an acting career takes many strange forms. 

For Naomi Watts, at the Toronto International Film Festival, it consisted of participating in a “virtual press conference” from her hotel in North Bay, Ontario, where she’s under quarantine before the start of a movie shoot (the Phillip Noyce thriller Lakewood).

The subject was accidentally tasting bird poop.

Naomi Watts and her occasionally misbehaving bird friend in Penguin Bloom.

Specifically, it involved Penguin, a magpie (10 of them in fact, portraying the same bird at different ages) in Penguin Bloom. It’s the true story of Australian Sam Bloom, who ended up a paraplegic after a fall in Thailand, and whose gloom was ultimately pierced when her family found a wounded baby bird and raised it.

“The thing that made me nervous was, how do we get a performance out of a bird?” Watts said in an online assembly with fellow cast members (including The Walking Dead’s Andrew Lincoln and Oscar-nominee Jacki Weaver, producers Emma Cooper and Bruna Papandrea, director Glendyn Ivin, and the real-life couple Sam and Cam Bloom.

“Magpies are famously not super-friendly,” Watts said. “It was concerning to me, and they walked me through it saying were going to do it with trained birds, animatronics and CGI. But I would say 90% was the true real-life birds

So, pretty much on the first day, this bird was on my head, chirping away. And the next thing you feel is a nice warm sensation trickling down your face. I was like ‘Agghhh!’ It went all the way down straight to my mouth.”

Yuck. But hey, it’s a living.

The Blooms’ photo-filled book about their dark times, the Penguin years, and Sam’s second act as a world-class kayaker, fell into the hands of Cooper, who was struck by “the connection between Sam and this bird that virtually fell out of the sky in her greatest hour of need.” She passed it on to her long-time friend Watts.

“I remember it was a Sunday morning lazy day in bed, and I was showing the kids the book,” Watts recalls. “And of course, I was really compelled by the images.

“And Sam’s journey went into the recovery place, having come from dark, dark places. As an actor, you’re looking for this all the time, someone who has an incredible trajectory.”
The guiding principle while filming, Ivin said, was, “remembering this is a real story. And the people we’re making a story about, this story deeply affected them and they’re still around. It’s not a story about one person, it’s about a married couple and their three children and we shot the film in their house (the couple found other living arrangements in the meantime). 

“It’s on one level incredibly invasive. And Cam and Sam were incredibly generous in handing their story to us.”

And then there was the wheelchair. Given that there were flashbacks where Watts had to be seen ambulatory, it would have been difficult to cast an authentically handicapped actor in the role. But the reverse was difficult as well.

Asked about hurdles in learning to use the wheels, Sam Bloom spoke directly and jokingly to Watts, “The only hurdle you had to overcome was staying in the wheelchair and not falling down.”

Watts confirmed it. “I did fall out of the chair backwards, which was quite scary. Mostly for me it was the getting-out-of-bed transfers. It’s very hard for your brain to tell your legs not to move and to use your upper body. 

“I felt very self-conscious about getting that right, especially when Sam was there. And we had a lot of conversations about getting that right. Obviously, Sam is very strong up there (in her upper body). So, I was trying to get that right, and it was much harder than I thought it would be.

“But I got along on that wheelchair a lot. And we had it at home to practice. It was just a matter of getting used to it.”

Sam was so incredibly generous and open, and it was golden to be able to get into intimate details about this period of her life. It’s very daunting to do the story of someone who’s still around. It’s a great responsibility, and you want to get those details exactly right. She was there on the set often.”

“It was surreal seeing Naomi playing me,” Bloom said. “It’s just great that they kept it real and honest.”