Los Angeles-based Turkish actress Cemre Paksoy — who is known in her country for roles in hit series “The Affair” and Netflix’s “As the Crow Flies” — is breaking new ground by playing Eleni Sadik, the lead in erotic thriller “Night Nurse,” whom she calls “a strange woman with a tendency for perversion.”
“Night Nurse,” which premiered in the NEXT section at Sundance Film Festival in January, marks the directorial debut of Georgia Bernstein. The indie movie is set in a luxury retirement community where Eleni is hired to take care of an enigmatic elderly patient, played by Bruce McKenzie (“House,” “Breaking Bad”). He draws her into perpetrating a series of phone scams as they become increasingly intimate and “the line blurs between care and desire, devotion and delusion,” as the film’s synopsis puts it.
Mimi Rogers (“Ginger Snaps”) rounds out the “Night Nurse” cast playing Dr. Mann, who oversees the increasingly disrupted Midwest retirement community where this twisted tale takes place.
Independent Film Company (formerly known as IFC Films) will release “Night Nurse” in U.S. theaters on July 10.
Below, Paksoy speaks to Variety about playing the protagonist in “Night Nurse” and how she and Bernstein drew on French feminist auteur Catherine Breillat’s work and Isabelle Huppert’s tour de force performance in Michael Haneke’s “The Piano Teacher” for inspiration.
