Every remake of Planet of the Apes has centered on a human protagonist in the struggle between the ultra-intelligent apes and the remnants of the human race. Our human stand-in for the recently released Kingdom is Freya Allan’s Mae from The Witcher. Mae appears at first to be a typical wild human—one who lacks speech, as was previously shown in War for the Planet of the Apes—but it soon becomes clear that Mae is more than what she first appears to be. Noa (Own Teague) had never seen Mae speak like a modern person before.
Allan revealed many things in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, including Mae’s intellect. She acknowledged in the interview that she had been ready to lie about that aspect of her character, which director Wes Ball also wished to remain unrevealed. It was a “shame,” she said, that the revelation appeared in one of the most recent trailers, but she hoped it would surprise viewers, just as it did Noa and his buddy Raka (Peter Macon).
Allan relied on her childhood games pretending to be an animal for those scenes in which Mae appears to be a typical ol’ feral. To avoid raising suspicions, Mae was supposed to find a middle ground between being “a rabbit in the headlights” and not being a “too perfect” imitation of the ferals she had grown up hearing about in stories. Allan gave Mae a physique that was somewhat, but not quite, similar to other feral people with the assistance of movement coordinator Alain Gauthier. She isn’t a savage, and her knowledge of them is limited. She said, “She’s not feral, and she doesn’t know that much about them. She hasn’t seen one [until early act two]. So you need to see those small moments where you go, ‘She’s not the same as other humans.’”
SPOILERS AHEAD
Act Two’s second half reveals that Mae is not only not feral but also that she is a member of a tiny group of humans who sought to destroy human technology that was hidden in a vault in the center of the realm of the ape king Promixus. She succeeds in her mission by flooding the vault before making her getaway, but when she eventually runs into Noa again at his house, it becomes clear in the middle of their chat that she is carrying a gun and is ready to use it against him.
Allan described the sequence as “so different” from how it was originally filmed since, in the beginning, Noa would have turned around and pointed the gun at the back of his head while he was talking. You think, ‘Oh my God, is she about to shoot him?’ And Mae is crying as she’s doing it, like, ‘Am I about to shoot him?’” Allan remembered. “And then she doesn’t. The minute he mentions Raka’s name, she puts the gun down.” She pushed for the editing to be altered to be “more subtle,” since it would create a murkier dynamic in upcoming movies.
“Mae was going there to kill [Noa] because he scares her,” she continued. “His intelligence scares her. She doesn’t want to kill him, but she feels she has to. And in that moment, she can’t. She’s done so many brutal things, but she can’t pull that trigger. So it becomes a very emotional goodbye, one with tragic, lingering doom. So that’s what I shot, but that’s the amazing thing about editing. You can change it and make it more up for interpretation.”
According to Allan, Mae’s actions were evenly distributed between meticulous planning and quick thinking throughout the movie. It was intended, she added, to follow Noa around and then talk, but being trapped by Proximus’ men made that last phase happen sooner than anticipated. At other times, Mae recognized that having Noa and his clan on her side would make her job easier; all she had to do was keep her true intentions hidden. Though there are moments of sincere friendship between them that may indicate that humans and apes could get along, in the end, “she has her own motives, and they’re not on the same team. […] What else is she supposed to do? Just tell him instantly that she wants to reconnect the humans of the entire planet? Not.”
The human characters from the modern Apes pictures are not returned, but if these new films are produced, it seems that Mae will remain the main character. If nothing else, Allan wants to continue playing Mae to see where she, Noa, and the other characters end up. “There’s such a theme of everything that they’ve ever known being completely challenged,” she said, “and I really want to see what they then do with what they’ve learned and where that takes them and how the things that they’ve gone through affect them. I would love to return.”
What do you think of her performance?
