Lucy Fry Brings Her Martial Arts Training to the Streets of Harlem

---

Lucy Fry is a warmhearted Australian with an easy laugh. She surfs, she lives in Los Angeles, she wears very little makeup, she loves the outdoors—but when it comes to acting, for Fry, things get a little darker.

In her earliest years, Fry was quiet and shy so her parents sent her to study speech and drama, essentially “so I could learn how to speak,” she recalls, adding that the poetry readings and speech practice in the class helped. At fourteen, she attended a theater performance of a physical theater company called Zen Zen Zo, an interpretation of Dracula. “[Zen Zen Zo] was this really cool, alternative theater group in Brisbane,” she says. “It’s based on a Japanese style of theater called Suzuki, which is basically acting with your feet. It’s very, very physical in a way, almost like martial arts.” Zen Zen Zo also applied butoh, a form of dance theater that started in Japan after World War II. “It’s super primal,” Fry describes. “It developed into this depiction of the grotesque feelings and the extremities of human emotion that didn’t really fit into film or television. It connects to your guts.” It was the first time she’d seen that acting could be a career, and she decided it was what she wanted to do. Still fourteen, she was the youngest in her class. “It’s intense,” she explains. “[Butoh is] not for the fainthearted.”

With her training in a physical theater that recalled martial art forms, her role as Tikka in the 2017 fantasy film Bright—for which director David Ayer had each member of his cast learn karate—was a natural progression into film acting. In her karate training, “I found that it added a different energy to my character,” Fry explains. “She became a lot tougher. I know I’m emotionally tough, but to be physically tough adds a different dimension to the way you carry yourself.” She hasn’t stopped her martial arts training, either, and she says it has improved her focus in everything she does, acting and surfing included. In karate, “it takes a lot of focus and discipline to learn all the different cutters and to show up and to get beaten and keep going,” she says. “When I’m going to karate a lot, I’m a lot more focused in everything I do in my life.”

With a background in specific forms of physical theater like butoh and Suzuki, Fry says in some ways, transitioning to television acting was easy. Having trained in “the most extreme form of theater, it’s easy to bring it back and make it small on screen, as opposed to going the other way around,” she explains. It comes down to commitment, focus, and attention to detail. “There’s a lot of imagination work in the physical theater training that I did,” she says. “So it’s all the same principles, just a different medium.”

After starring in a number of Australian television series from 2010 to 2013, Fry was cast as Lissa Dragomir in the 2014 teen flick Vampire Academy alongside Zoey Deutch. Shortly after her move to the States, she starred in the first season of the horror anthology series Wolf Creek and the time-traveling Stephen King adaptation 11.22.63, playing the wife of JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald opposite James Franco and George MacKay.

Her latest role—as Stella, the daughter of an Italian gangster in Sixties New York wrapped up in a Romeo and Juliet-esque love story with Kelvin Harrison Jr‘s Teddy on the new series Godfather of Harlem—has been the experience of a lifetime for Fry. “Forest Whitaker is incredible,” she says of the show’s lead, who plays the titular real-life crime boss Bumpy Johnson. “That was one of the reasons I was so excited about doing this show, was to work with Forest and see how he does what he does. He really brings it,” she says. Nailing Stella’s New York accent wasn’t easy, says Fry, but it’s all part of the process. “Stella loves music,” the 27-year-old actor adds, so in preparation for the role, “I got into a lot of Sixties music and things she would have been listening to at the time. I started playing bass guitar again, bonding with her, in a way, getting to know her.”

The way Fry describes it, getting into character means allowing that character to possess her on some level. It sounds a bit eerie, but it isn’t. If anything, it’s an exercise in empathy. “I feel like, in order to invite the character into my body, I need to get a good rapport with them,” she says, “pay attention to what they like and how they see things. To really look at different facets of what my character would be interested in.” Watching her recent performances, each vastly different from each other, this approach appears to be working. As a result, Fry says her own life changes with each character. “I have a bit of a strange thing where roles will come along that are relevant to things I need to learn in my life at that time. Maybe it’s just the way I work—I find ways to make whatever the character’s going through relate to something that I’m going through and something that I really want to fight for.”

As someone who grew up surfing, hiking, and spending time in nature, one of the things Fry fights for as an adult is a cleaner, healthier planet. She’s up for the challenge. Working with her stylist, she focuses on building her wardrobe almost exclusively from vintage; on the red carpet, she says it’s about collaborating with eco-responsible designers who are as committed to the cause as she is.

As for her career, “I feel like my goals change a lot,” says Fry. Watching herself and the film industry evolve, she says, makes it hard to stay committed to just one thing. But if nothing else, the truth is the one thing that continues to draw her in. “Things that happen in real life are always so much crazier than you could ever come up with in your imagination,” she laughs. “I’d love to start making films like that—where these characters are just raw and unfiltered. I love the electricity. I just can’t look away.”

Godfather of Harlem continues on Sundays on Epix.