Olivia Wilde Enters the Game Grid of Tron Legacy

Your character, Quorra, is a program in the system -technically, she's a machine. How do you bring warmth and compassion to a character that is intrinsically mechanical and stiff?

Olivia Wilde: She's unlike many of the programs. She's lived with Kevin Flynn for what, in the Tron world, is about two hundred years as his apprentice, as his student, as his protector. She's learned a huge amount of humanity from him, about history, about literature in the user world from him. And that includes spirituality as well. So I think that she has taken a lot from Flynn and incorporated it into her being, into her way.

For me, preparing a character that's not human can't be different than preparing a character that is human. If I make them non-human in my mind, then they'll be missing some sort of heart or something that I can empathize with. Instead I found characters in history that I felt like Quorra was reminiscent of, and that's when I discovered the Joan of Arc connection. There's a particular book by Mark Twain about Joan of Arc that was actually his favorite book that he ever wrote. He spent twelve years in France researching her. It's an incredible story and the way he writes it is really beautiful. Once I had that text, I suddenly felt like I had unlocked Quorra because here she was, a child - Joan of Arc was fourteen - leading the French army. The unlikely warrior, a small, child-like thing who was incredibly powerful and who cast a spell of reverence because of her connection to some higher power. She was human, but seemed to be partly not...somehow part of another world. So that really informed Quorra. A lot about Joan of Arc informed Quorra.

I also studied Buddhism because Jeff was really interested in having the story be like a Buddhist myth. Flynn himself is almost a Buddha-like character in the way that he meditates in this cave where's he's been restricted for hundreds of years. It's his way of coping. I learned quite a lot about that. It was also a way for me to bond with Jeff. We had to find a connection because our characters have sort of a shorthand relationship that's so deep. We wanted the audience to really feel that they knew each other well and that she certainly would do anything for Flynn. So we got to connect as actors in order to create that relationship.

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