An action thriller that mostly takes place inside a floating air balloon, Turbulence, starring Outlander: Blood of My Blood star Jeremy Irvine, Hera Hilmar, Olga Kurylenko and Kelsey Grammer, is filled with deceit. Directed by Claudio Fäh, Emmy (Hilmar) finds out a lot of unexpected secrets about her husband Zach (Irvine) when Kurylenko’s character Julia unexpectedly shows up on what’s supposed to be a romantic hot air balloon ride for the couple, guided by Grammer’s character.

“My agent told me about the script. They said it’s a movie set in a hot air balloon. And I sort of went, well, that’s ridiculous. What are you talking about?” Irvine told Yahoo. “Then I heard about the cast that are involved, and I started thinking, well … it’s basically like a theatre show with three actors that I really admire and have looked up to for a long time, and I get to be in a box with them for a few weeks and just act with them. … It’s been quite a few years since I’ve been doing theatre, and so I just sort of saw it as a bit of an opportunity to scratch that itch.”

“It’s funny, because when [everyone goes], ‘What’s the most fun thing to shoot?’ Everyone assumes it’s like these big action sequences. And actually, it’s not for the actors. It’s when you’ve just got you and another actor or two in a room, doing a scene. And that’s basically what this is, but with the action thrown in.”

“It totally changes the work,” Hilmar added. “Both for you as an actor and just how it’s seen, how you tell the story. And then the film is nearly all set in real time, which is something you don’t get to do very often.”

“And I think as a viewer, it’s a totally different experience, and as an actor, is a totally different experience. … Because the whole film, apart from just the beginning, it’s like a long scene. You never get a break where you go, ‘OK, I’m going to change the mood here.'”

Collaborating with director Fäh, a large portion of executing Turbulence was working in a confined space, with Kurylenko highlighting that it required a great deal of specificity.

“We had to stand in a certain way, … so that the camera could also catch us and work between us,” Kurylenko said. “And sometimes it was actually quite challenging for the [camera] operator, because he didn’t know where to go, because we were already four people, plus, if he had to get in the basket, it was practically impossible. So technically, it was very challenging. We really had to respect our spots. … Everything had to be very precise and rehearsed.”

Jeremy Irvine: ‘It’s so fun to play a real piece of shit’

For Hilmar, part of the appeal of playing Emmy was portraying a “normal” woman who experiences a significant trauma, only to ultimately reveal her true strength.

“I had to kind of get to know her during the film,” Hilmar said. “She’s a kindergarten teacher. She did have a miscarriage. She’s married to this man who’s a bit different to her. Why? That’s something I could think about. But then, really, we get to know her in terms of, who is she when shit hits the fan. She has to kind of really be the fullest version of herself.”

Meanwhile, for Irvine, stepping into the role of a “bad guy” was a fun change for the actor who’s usually cast as characters who are quite the opposite.

“I’ve done a lot of playing the nice guy, and it’s so fun to play a real piece of shit,” Irvine said. “He just purely cares about himself. … Everyone else is just so disposable to him.”

“I think that’s probably why he’s with Emmy, is because she’s controllable. He can manipulate her. He can control her. And then what’s great about the story, and I think anyone who’s been in a relationship where there’s been even a bit of that, you get to see the asshole get his comeuppance. And you get to see the girl who he thought he could control, who he thought he could manipulate, throw him out of a hot air balloon.”

While Kurylenko is largely known for her roles in action films like Black Widow, Thunderbolts*, and Oblivion, what really inspired her to become an actor was watching Emily Watson’s character, Bess McNeill, in the 1996 film Breaking the Waves. While she indicated she’s never done a film that “devastating,” it’s the appeal to that kind of psychological drama that’s also evident in how she thought about the backstory of her Tubulance character.

“I never thought, ‘I’ll be an action hero.’ … So I was doing it, and then at some point, people, of course, tend to offer you the same things that they see that you do well,” Kurylenko said. “So people don’t want to risk, or they don’t have imagination, or they don’t know that you can do other things.”

“What I liked in this story is that my character was quite deranged and had this grain of folly in her. And we realized that she’s completely traumatized. … It’s almost like a possession. She’s possessed by vengeance and grief. … To me, this character had a real underlying mental illness. And of course, it wasn’t written as such. … She is grieving and she’s crazy, and she’s out for vengeance, … she’s also a little bit off, and she’s always been like this. … For example, the inappropriate laughs and things like this. I tried to kind of put it in there.”