{"id":2407591,"date":"2026-05-08T13:06:21","date_gmt":"2026-05-08T13:06:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2407591"},"modified":"2026-05-08T13:06:21","modified_gmt":"2026-05-08T13:06:21","slug":"sally-field-on-remarkably-bright-creatures-working-with-her-son-and-acting-with-an-octopus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/sally-field-on-remarkably-bright-creatures-working-with-her-son-and-acting-with-an-octopus\/","title":{"rendered":"Sally Field on ‘Remarkably Bright Creatures’, Working With Her Son, and Acting With an Octopus"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Spoilers below.<\/em><\/p>\n

Shelby Van Pelt\u2019s bestselling book Remarkably Bright Creatures<\/em> was destined to become a movie. The real question was whether the friendship between Tova, a widow working as a cleaner, and Marcellus, a very chatty octopus, could come across as beautifully on-screen as it did on the page. But then Sally Field was quickly cast as Tova, followed by Lewis Pullman, who played her young friend Cameron, and the picture became clear. Field spoke with ELLE about discovering the book, working with her son, who produced the film, and the behind-the-scenes secrets she\u2019s not willing to reveal.<\/p>\n

Had you read the book before signing on for the movie?<\/h2>\n

It was brought to me in galleys before it had been published by a new production company called Night Owl, by Bryan Unkeless and Peter Craig. And oddly enough, the Peter Craig part of the production company is my oldest son. It\u2019s their first project. I read the first two chapters and said, \u201cYes, yes, I want to do this.\u201d Then I continued to read, and it\u2019s such a magical and moving story about people and an homage to sea creatures, in this case, a Giant Pacific octopus.<\/p>\n

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What was it like to work with your son?<\/h2>\n

Unfortunately, he just produced it, so I didn\u2019t get to see him as much as I would\u2019ve liked. I was still able to use him a lot and call him and say, \u201cHow about this? Do you like…\u201d Talking about changing when I felt something, a monologue or something needed to be fine-tuned. He was a good sounding board before I would then bring it to [director] Olivia [Newman] or whoever else. Whenever he was there on the set visiting, it was wonderful. Also, the story is a lot about a mother and her son, and all of it fit together.<\/p>\n

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Courtesy of Netflix<\/span><\/figcaption>

Sally Field as Tova and Lewis Pullman as Cameron in Remarkably Bright Creatures<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n

I\u2019d love to hear about the logistics of acting with Marcellus. I assume he was added in later.<\/h2>\n

Well, Lewis Pullman and I have talked about it. I\u2019m hesitant to spoil anything by saying exactly what it was. It\u2019s all magic. But whether there\u2019s a total octopus there all the time or none whatsoever, all of acting is imagining. In that way, it\u2019s nothing new.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an interesting role because it starts out very solitary but then shifts when Tova becomes close with Cameron. What was it like to work with Lewis?<\/h2>\n

I was lucky enough to get to read with him. I read with several other actors for the role of Cameron, and then he walked in, and it was it. I didn\u2019t say it, but looked at Livy, the director, like, \u201cOkay, this is him.\u201d Lewis and I just launched into improvisation and playing together. I simply adored working with him. He made everything work for me and made it just joyful. Even if the scenes weren\u2019t joyful, it was just so gratifying to be with him. I don\u2019t think there are a lot of them like Lewis. He has so much more that he hasn\u2019t tapped into yet that he will at one point in his career. He\u2019s really funny, but also a very serious actor and a very dramatic actor. He\u2019s also musical. He\u2019s hugely talented.<\/p>\n

The coastal Vancouver setting looks so beautiful in the movie. Is that an area you had a connection to before? It\u2019s such an important part of the book.<\/h2>\n

It\u2019s one of the characters of the story, really. I love New York a lot, but I think the city that really has my heart is Vancouver. I wish Canada would adopt me. I\u2019ll do anything. Vancouver\u2019s a magnificent spot in the world. For anyone who hasn\u2019t been there, it just is spectacular. Everything was quite lovely.<\/p>\n

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Courtesy of Netflix<\/span><\/figcaption>

Sally Field as Tova with Marcellus.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n

Do you feel like you have any similarities to Tova in your personality?<\/h2>\n

An actress\u2019s task is always to find the places in the character that link up with pieces that are in yourself, even if they might be pieces that you have a hard time revealing or bringing to the surface. That\u2019s the task of an actor. I don\u2019t know what they were, but somewhere we linked.<\/p>\n

When you were reading the book, could you already see the role and how you would approach Marcellus?<\/h2>\n

No, no. You can\u2019t plan that far in advance. You can\u2019t come in with a predisposed plan of what you\u2019re going to do when you get there. You have to have all the history that the actor has all the way up to the moment you enter that scene and then let it play itself. Let the pieces fall where they may. So I had no preconceived idea of how I was going to see anything or do anything. Once we got to the actual screenplay, which was hard to get to because it\u2019s a delicate little piece of lace, this magical book, then it was just really being the character every day as much as I could with all of the things that were going on with her life and her brain.<\/p>\n

This interview has been edited and condensed.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.elle.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Spoilers below. Shelby Van Pelt\u2019s bestselling book Remarkably Bright Creatures was destined to become a movie. The real question was whether the friendship between Tova, a widow working as a cleaner, and Marcellus, a very chatty octopus, could come across as beautifully on-screen as it did on the page. But then Sally Field was quickly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2407592,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25177],"tags":[310910,470631,285977,286903,466866,285684,443346,470630,441118],"class_list":["post-2407591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-celebrities","tag-content-type-feature","tag-contentid-35686f50-9af1-49cf-b725-27878c7dafe0","tag-displaytype-standard-article","tag-hasproduct-true","tag-issyndicated-false","tag-locale-us","tag-read_time-4","tag-shorttitle-how-sally-field-co-starred-with-an-octopus","tag-subsection-movies-tv"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Sally-Field-on-Remarkably-Bright-Creatures-Working-With-Her-Son.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2407591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2407591"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2407591\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2407593,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2407591\/revisions\/2407593"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2407592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2407591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2407591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2407591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}