NEW YORK, Feb. 28 (UPI) — I Know What You Did You Last Summer, Gosford Park and Crash actor Ryan Phillippe says the father-daughter story at the center of One Mile and its sequel One Mile: Chapter Two is what initially attracted him to starring in the two-part action-thriller.
Helmed by La Brea, Deadwood and Lost director Adam Davidson, the films cast Phillippe as Danny, a former special forces operative trying to re-connect with his teenage daughter Alex (Amelie Hoeferle) during a college road trip when she is kidnapped by members of an off-the-grid community.
The Outsiders and Red Dawn icon C. Thomas Howell plays Stanley, the leader of the group, which seeks women from the outside world to have their children.
The project marks a reunion between Phillippe and Aaron Kaplan, his producer on the 2015 series, Secrets and Lies.
“We had a prior working relationship and he called me up one day and pitched this idea that was born out of a real-life situation where he was taking his daughter on college tours,” Phillippe, 51, told UPI in a recent Zoom interview.
“They were on the back roads in some area of New Hampshire. There was no cell service and she sort of said, ‘Dad, what would happen if we broke down right now and we can’t use our cell phones?’ And, so, from there, they kind of conceived this story that ended up becoming One Mile.”
Phillippe, the real-life father of three children, recalled how Kaplan asked him if he’d like to come on board as a producer and the lead.
“We spent a couple of years developing it, going through rewrites and figuring out logistically how we were going to do it,” Phillippe said.
“Shooting a movie and a sequel concurrently is pretty novel. It doesn’t happen too much. It’s very ambitious with a lot of logistical challenges for both the cast and crew involved in that,” he added.
“Also, for me, emotionally, I loved that at the heart of the story there was this father and daughter relationship that needed to be repaired and healed, and that that was my character’s primary motivation from the outset, before things go off the rails and it becomes a survival story.”
Because of the cat-and-mouse nature of the story — Danny spends most of his time trying to find and rescue Alex — Phillippe and Howell didn’t share much time on screen.
“We didn’t have a ton of scenes together, but we were on set together quite a bit and would commiserate,” Phillippe said.
“Some of the conditions were pretty difficult. It was freezing cold. Vancouver Island is beautiful, but it’s incredibly wild. It rained almost every day, so it was shared hardship in some sense.”
The scenes they did have together were impactful and meant a lot to Phillippe.
“He’s somebody I admire. We’re not that far in age, but I watched his films when I was young and they probably were part of the reason why I became an actor, in some way,” he said. “The Outsiders of Red Dawn were classics for me.”
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