Exclusive: Nick Stahl in 'Quid Pro Quo'
Nick Stahl talks exclusively with Premiere about his new film, 'Quid Pro Quo,' a dark thriller that explores a shadowy subculture of disability fetishists.
By Karl Rozemeyer
Nick Stahl in Quid Pro Quo
Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
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Read Premiere's interview with Vera Farmiga about Quid Pro Quo.
What is that makes a sexy, able-bodied blonde bombshell not only a devotee of paraplegic men but also determined to live out her own life in a wheelchair? This is just one of the many puzzling questions explored in the thriller Quid Pro Quo, which stars Nick Stahl as Isaac, a semi-paralyzed journalist, and Vera Farmiga as Fiona, a beautiful wheelchair wannabe with a thing for leg braces and corsets.
An anonymous tip from someone who calls herself Ancient Chinese Girl leads Isaac into a subculture of people who seek various forms of amputation and/or paralysis at any cost. In the course of his investigation, Isaac meets Fiona and finds himself lured into her strange world, perhaps aware that a deeply buried truth about his past is inexplicably connected to her dark desires.
Nick Stahl (Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Sin City, The Thin Red Line) chats exclusively with Premiere about the subculture of disability fetishists, the psychological and physical challenges of playing someone in a wheelchair, and acting opposite the red-hot Vera Farmiga.
PLEASE NOTE: THIS INTERVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS.
PREMIERE: The film explores a subculture I didn't know very much about before the film.
I didn't either, until we started. I had heard of them because there was [a] documentary about these people that want to be amputees or paralyzed, and so I knew it existed.
Nick Stahl in Quid Pro Quo
Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
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Did you do any research about voluntary amputees or wheelchair users first? The film explores the different types of fetishists: devotees, pretenders, wannabes, and then Vera's character puts herself in a totally different category.
Yeah. I didn't do as much research into that as probably Vera did, because I'm the guy who doesn't know [about] it in the movie. I didn't need to do that kind of research. The research I did for the movie was kind of being in a wheelchair and all that stuff, getting used to the wheelchair. Because I was sort of the detective in the movie, I was kind of finding out all this stuff as I went along, and so I really didn't want to do the research to learn about all that stuff.
So, was it more about the physicality of the role?
Yeah. Well yes, that was a big factor, psychologically too, just — which is what I do pretty much for every movie I do, just to get a solid idea for where the character is coming from, and the character's background, history, what they want in life and things like that.
Did you spend a lot of time in a wheelchair before going on set?
I did. I had a couple weeks. I didn't have too much time, but yeah, for two weeks I wheeled around Manhattan.
That couldn't have been easy...
No, it's not, it's not at all. It's exhausting. Not just the traffic of people and stuff, but it's physically exhausting. And the streets — you think they're flat, but they're slanted. If you're going down a sidewalk, and it's slanted sideways, you're using one arm to stay up. And then if it's uphill, of course, that's really hard. And then curbs and things like that, it can get difficult. I was just trying not to fall out of it because then people would have freaked out around me.
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