Olivia Cooke : Friend Or Fiend?

Olivia Kate Cooke was born on December 27, 1993 in Oldham, Greater Manchester, England. She is a capricorn. Her nickname is Cookie, which is apt, as she says she enjoys eating cookies. She started acting at the Oldham Theatre Workshop, where she enrolled in an after-school youth programme. She studied drama at Oldham Sixth Form College, where she played the role of Maria in a production of Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents' musical 'West Side Story'. She then joined the Oldham Theatre Workshop where she performed in 'Prom : The Musical', a reimagining of 'Cinderella'.

In 2012, Cooke appeared in a touring video produced for a song by One Direction. This led to her getting a piggyback ride from pop superstar Harry Styles. Her application to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) was rejected, so she ventured out on her own, finding her niche in small independent film productions. She counts English actress Helena Bonham Carter among her idols and enjoys a hot cup of Tetley tea with her biscuits.

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'Ouija' is a supernatural horror that's co-produced by Jason Blum, founder and CEO of the eponymous Blumhouse Productions. Its success initiated one of several successful franchises launched by Blum and his associates in the last decade. The film itself draws a degree of inspiration from their 'Paranormal Activity' franchise of the 2000s.

'Ouija' stars Olivia Cooke, Bianca Santos, Daren Kagasoff and Douglas Smith as teenagers who unleash spirits from a Ouija board. It's followed by the prequel, 'Ouija : Origin of Evil' (2016).

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'The Quiet Ones' is a supernatural horror in the grand British tradition. It's produced by Hammer Films, the most famous English production house for horror cinema. The story concerns Professor Joseph Coupland (Jared Harris) and his efforts to interrogate disturbed patient Jane Harper (Olivia Cooke) who's suspected of conjuring a poltergeist she calls Evey. Coupland enlists several students to aid him in his endeavours, including paranormal investigator Kristina Dalton (Erin Richards) whom he's romantically entangled with. Analytical cameraman Brian McNeil (Sam Claflin) and strapping kit handler Harry Abrams (Rory Fleck Byrne) arrive to add an extra layer of security as Jane's erratic behaviour is becoming increasingly harder to predict.

'The Quiet Ones' is my favourite horror film to emerge from Hammer Film Productions since the studio was relaunched in 2007. The dramatic tension hinges upon Jane's errant behaviour and unsettling vibe. She has her doll and she has a friend in Evey. But is she posessed, and does she herself possess telekinetic powers? Is she driven by an impulse to tease, or is she a resting nymphomaniac as she herself infers? Is she the victim of a cruel experiment, or is she experimenting with her captors?

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'The Signal is a small-scale science-fiction fantasy in which hackers enter into a world they cannot fathom. Nic Eastman (Brenton Thwaites) and Jonah Breck (Beau Knapp) are students at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) with a gift for tapping into computer systems. During a road trip to California, for which Nic's girlfriend Haley Peterson (Olivia Cooke) takes the wheel, they become unsuspectingly waylaid at what appears to be a non-access, government facility. Their only clue to getting there is that they tapped up an anonymous hacker. Fortunately, the facility contains a hospital ward, as the three of them must undergo treatment. But just what are they being treated for?

'The Signal' is an ambitious low budget science-fiction film that has some effective moments. I think the romantic angle weighs it down badly (and feels a tad unnecessary), but the interrogation scenes involving Doctor Wallace Damon (Laurence Fishburne) provide some crackle. Olivia Cooke spends part of the movie in a coma, but she also has some good moments outside of some slushy stuff with Australian leading man Brenton Thwaites.

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'The Limehouse Golem' is based on a historical crime novel by Peter Ackroyd. In Victorian London, music hall entertainer Elizabeth Cree (Olivia Cooke) stands accused of poisoning her husband, playwright John Cree (Sam Reid). London's docklands have fallen silent beneath the Golem's reign of terror, a serial killer who's murdering and mutilating seemingly random people at will. Inspector John Kildare (Bill Nighy) is called upon to investigate.

'The Limehouse Golem' is one of my favourite films of the last decade. It's a stylised gothic that's directed with considerable flair by Juan Carlos Medina. It's beautifully lit and lensed with imagination, employing a flashback storybook structure that's triggered by the discovery of a killer's diary (concealed within a printed copy of Thomas De Quincey's 1827 essay 'On Murder Considered As One Of The Fine Arts').

The casting of 'The Limehouse Golem' is excellent and the characters are extremely well drawn. The mystery plays out in traditional fashion, but Medina soaks up the squalid elements of Victorian life, contrasting them with an evolving backstage melodrama. In this regard, I'd recommend 'The Limehouse Golem' to fans of Richard Eyre's 'Stage Beauty' (2004), Stephen Frears' 'Mrs Henderson Presents' (2005) and Stephan Elliott's 'Easy Virtue' (2008) just as readily as I would to fans of Roman Polanski's 'The Ninth Gate' (1999), Tim Burton's 'Sleepy Hollow' (1999) and the Hughes Brothers' 'From Hell' (2001). With each viewing I enjoy it all the more and I find myself appreciating different things about Lizzie Cree's broad character arc.

"All the world’s a bloody stage in this gothic Victorian East End melodrama, splendidly adapted from a 1994 novel by Peter Ackroyd. A tale of theatrical murder drenched in the rich hues of classic-period Hammer, this gaslit treat sets Bill Nighy’s Scotland Yard detective on the trail of a grisly killer in 1880s London. Swinging between the ghoulish gaiety of the music hall and the grim stench of the morgue, the second feature from Insensibles/Painless director Juan Carlos Medina is a deliciously subversive affair, nimbly adapted by super-sharp screenwriter Jane Goldman and vivaciously played by an impressive ensemble cast.
“Let us begin, my friends, at the end,” drawls our host, drawing back the curtain on a city terrorised by a killer named after a beast from Jewish folklore. Inspector John Kildare (Nighy) is the investigative fall guy, assigned to an apparently unsolvable case that has gripped the public imagination but baffled the police. A connection to the Ratcliffe Highway murders, about which Thomas De Quincey wrote, seems to offer a lead. Tantalisingly, the killer has scrawled accounts of their crimes among the pages of De Quincy’s satirical text, putting four potential readers at the British Library in the frame: novelist George Gissing (Morgan Watkins), philosopher Karl Marx (Henry Goodman), music hall favourite Dan Leno (Douglas Booth) and the enigmatic John Cree (Sam Reid, channelling Richard Chamberlain). The last of these is a journalist-turned-playwright whose board-treading wife, Elizabeth (Olivia Cooke), now stands accused of poisoning her husband. Kildare is convinced of her innocence, but the noose of guilt is gradually tightening around both their necks.
From the first crimson-soaked murder to the blackly comic curtain call, The Limehouse Golem revels in the bawdy interplay between fact and fiction, between real life and staged death. An early crime scene is overrun by “locals looking for entertainment… cheaper than a ticket to a shocker”. A scrawled Latin inscription (“He who observes spills no less blood than he who inflicts the blow”) implicates the audience in these murders, while the Golem’s first kill is likened to the work of “an understudy, not yet ready for this great stage”. When John woos “Little Lizzie” with talk of saving the heroine of his maudlin play Misery Junction, he intentionally blurs the line between his fictional heroine and his real-life muse. Later in the dock, the actress is ironically accused of “playing a role”.
Unfolding in unreliable flashback to crowd-pleasing musical accompaniment (What Did She Know About Railways? makes a boisterous appearance), this narrative leads us a merry dance. Cinematographer Simon Dennis contrasts the warm colours of the theatre with the misty shadows of the streets, while drained tones paint the courtroom scenes as little more than an empty sideshow. As for the graphic crime re-enactments (dramatised readings of the killer’s diaries), they keep the horrors at a distance through a carefully constructed air of artifice. In this world, all boundaries are fluid – performance and reality, past and present, male and female.

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Olivia Cooke's biggest role to date came when Steven Spielberg hired her for the science-fiction fantasy adventure 'Ready Player One'. It's based on the novel 'Ready Player One' (2011) by Ernest Cline and is set within the complex world of virtual reality and gaming.

"I auditioned for drama school [RADA], didn’t get in. I don’t know if that was because I had a very thick northern accent or not [chuckles] but then I started working in America, where these preconceived notions of having a working class accent aren’t understood. They just go off being right for the character and right for the job. So having that trajectory, those little bits of success in America, I’ve been able to come to England and I’ve been a lead in an ITV production of 'Vanity Fair' playing Betty Sharpe. I don’t know if that would’ve happened if I’d stayed here in England.
I think England’s the only place in the world where you can walk into a room, open your mouth and people can immediately tell where you’re from, and then have preconceived ideas of what you’re like. What you are like as a person."

Olivia Cooke is contracted to appear in any projected sequels to 'Ready Player One', but to the best of my knowledge, nothing's been greenlit. I don't know if this deal extends to prequels or spin-offs. The book 'Ready Player One' was Ohioan slam poet Ernest Cline's debut novel so he might write his own follow-up. Plans are already in place for a film adaptation of Cline's second science-fiction novel, 'Armada' (2015).

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Olivia Cooke is living in America but says she's keen to keep working in the U K if the right opportunities arise. She's learnt how to roll with the punches and her association with Steven Spielberg should open a few doors in the industry. She's even in the latest conversation as to who might eventually play Batgirl in a big screen vehicle.

If anybody still doubts Olivia Cooke's resolve, she's even survived the ignominy of being singled out by celebrated film guru Colonel Needham, the leading CEO and popular industry entrepreneur who's said to be worth in excess of $50,000,000. Needham granted her an IMDB Starmeter reading that earned her an illustrious glass shard award.