Sex, drugs and Iggy Pop. What more could you want from a film noir thriller, set in a clinically luxurious villa in sun-bleached Ibiza?
In Blood Orange, Iggy Pop plays ageing rock star Bill, married to the much younger Isabelle. Interrupting their unconventional but otherwise happy marital bliss is the son of Isabelle’s previous husband who thinks she is a serial gold digger and has come to extort what he believes is his rightful inheritance, or have an affair with her, or preferably both.
“I’ve noticed the audience want to see Isabelle as a villain because she is what some people would call promiscuous,” says Kacey Clarke, who plays the femme fatale. “The audience don’t want to like her because of how she’s behaving with men. She’s by no means afraid to embrace her sexuality. There is a strength in that.”
After a six-year term at Grange Hill, stopping off at The Bill and Casualty, Clarke graduated to bit parts in The Inbetweeners and films such as Lake Placid 3 and the fourth instalment of the Resident Evil franchise. Blood Orange is her first lead role, and one of the first opportunities she has had of playing a character who is more than just set dressing.
In Blood Orange, the main trio of players are impossible to pin down. As soon as one wins your sympathy, another side of their character is revealed. Clarke jumped at the chance to play a complex female character. “It was very empowering playing a woman like that,” Clarke explains.
“She isn’t putting herself in a box because she’s female, she’s living on the impulses that she has. Women have the same impulses and desires too, it’s just a lot of the time we’re shamed if we act out on them – when we behave in a certain way that is okay for men. She’s not some sweet naïve girl but at the same time she genuinely loves her husband, that was the spin I wanted to throw on it.”
