Written By: Michael D. McClellan |
Picture this: Even in a crowded Instagram universe teeming with bombshell influencers, Claudia Maree Mailer stands out. The England-born, New Zealand-raised, New York-based actor is a revelation, and not because every waking moment is a carefully choreographed photo shoot, the resulting content served up for the voyeuristic consumption of an ever-expanding follower base. Sure, there are OOTD photos that reflect her refreshingly keen sense of style, just as there exist jet set shots from places like Los Angeles, Paris, and Queenstown, but there’s much more to Mailer than the same ol’ selfie shtick. There is no niche, per se, when it comes to Mailer’s feed (you’re just as apt to stumble across a post of her French Bulldog, Peggy Beatrix, as you are a glammed up rooftop shot), nor are her photos uploaded with the same unrelenting frequency of a Natalie Roser, the Australian model with more followers than the population of Chicago. The hook that makes her stand out? Mailer is an actor standing on the precipice of stardom. What she shares on social media is part of that ever-evolving mosaic, taking us on her journey rather than spinning our wheels in the mud of Instagram monotony. We not only witness her metamorphosis, we level up right along with her, instinctively getting that Claudia Maree Mailer isn’t the next interchangeable blonde ingenue. Hell no. She’s a whip-smart talent with an old-school work ethic and acting chops well beyond her 25 years. Claudia Maree Mailer is going places.
Ironic then that Mailer, in her first lead role, plays Marie Clark, who is using her influencer status to pay for her Master’s Degree in Comparative Religion, while moving on from an abusive past. Marie’s life finally appears to be on the right track, but everything changes when an obsessive fan steals her diary. As if having her privacy violated wasn’t enough, the unknown antagonist sends Marie a series of twisted love letters, promising to kill anyone who is a danger to her.
Photo Courtesy Mailer Tuchman Media
The film, DieRy, written by John Buffalo Mailer and superbly imagined by Director Jennifer Gelfer, is available on VOD August 25th. DieRy also stars Thomas Q. Jones (Straight Outta Compton, Luke Cage), Keisha Castle-Hughes (Star Wars: Episode 4, Game of Thrones), and Brendan Robinson (Pretty Little Liars), and includes a brilliant performance by Northern Ireland-born builder-turned-actor Ciaran Byrne, who portrays Angus McCoughlin, hired to track down Marie’s mysterious stalker. Together, Mailer and Byrne power this thriller along every twist and turn.
“There are plenty of both,” Mailer says on the first day of promotional interviews. “This is a film that doesn’t reveal too much. It definitely keeps you guessing. Even her closest friends suddenly can’t be trusted, which certainly heightens the tension.”
That Mailer breathes such authenticity into her character comes as no surprise to Gelfer, who hired her to work on the set of the 2017 film Blind, starring Alec Baldwin, Demi Moore, and Dylan McDermott. While an uncredited appearance as a college student went mostly unnoticed, the same can’t be said for Mailer’s tireless work as the Director’s Assistant. She was so good, in fact, that Gelfer later hired her to be her assistant. For the next two years, Mailer kept Gelfer’s world organized with military-like precision, while never once mentioning that she herself was an actor. Only when Gelfer stumbled onto a Facebook clip of Mailer doing a monologue did she discover the talent hidden in plain sight.
Photo Courtesy Mailer Tuchman Media
“Claudia was magical,” Gelfer recalls of watching the clip. “I’m a teacher, and I sat there for a moment, spellbound, before I said to myself, ‘Oh my God, that girl does everything I teach. And she’s my assistant!’”
The resulting epiphany led Gelfer to cast Claudia as Max’s Mother in The Second Sun, a romance set in 1953 Manhattan, with the Holocaust serving as a backdrop. Her character is revealed in a series of flashbacks, appears on screen only a few minutes, and has very little in the way of dialogue. Doesn’t matter. Mailer (then Claudia Peters) not only delivers a skillful performance, she captivates in a way that the camera can’t ignore.
“Claudia was incandescent,” says Gelfer. “You couldn’t take your eyes off of her. You could tell that she’s a star on the precipice. All she needs is an opportunity to show the world that she is like no one else.”
Photo Courtesy Mailer Tuchman Media
Which brings us full circle to DieRy. The film keeps you off balance from the jump, beginning with Marie being photographed on a rooftop by Kevin, a scummy Instagram photographer, played by Brendan Robinson. We soon learn that there are several other questionable characters in Marie’s orbit, as well as her psychologist (Brighton, played by James Sutorious) and Comparative Religion professor (Harris, played by Thomas Q. Jones), both with ulterior motives. Add Marie’s two best friends to the mix (the wealthy Richard, played by Philip Alexander, and her Instagram-obsessed girlfriend, Sarah, played by Samantha Strelitz), throw a party at her fashionable Los Angeles apartment, and the conditions are ripe for what happens next.
“Marie comes home one afternoon and finds a letter under the door,” Mailer says. “She learns that her diary has been stolen, the direct consequence of putting so much online. In that moment, everything changes.”
Photo Courtesy Mailer Tuchman Media
Mailer gives Marie Clark sharp edges beneath a smooth, lacquered exterior; she is not only fantastic-looking, but also canny and self-protective. The rest of the film sets up the untangling of Marie’s abusive past, all while a killer goes on a murder spree.
“When I wrote my mission statement, a big part of wanting to do this film was because of Claudia,” says Gelfer. “Her command of the scenes, her presence in front of the camera…Claudia plays her part beautifully.”
DieRy is remarkably assured, deeply engaging, and works on several levels: as a thriller, a cautionary tale in the cloud-connected Age of Instagramification, and something else entirely, the perfect vehicle for an emerging artist to strut her stuff. Gelfer’s deft touch, combined with the symbiotic relationship between director and star, brings John Buffalo Mailer’s script to life and gives Claudia room to maneuver. She takes over from there, delivering a measured performance that brings her sexuality ever so close to the surface, where she sustains it, just out of reach, fueling Marie’s effect on the film’s collective male libido. Then the letters start showing up and the bodies start piling up. Hiring Angus heightens the tension and deepens the plot, cleverly taking an iGeneration whodunit and giving it the feel of a Forties noir.
The fact that Claudia Maree Mailer is even in New York, making movies like this, is a testament to her drive and ambition. The bucolic New Zealand life offered plenty, and it was there that she got her start, performing in Grease, Chicago, and Into the Woods as part of the Nelson Youth Theatre. At 17 she was accepted to Team New Zealand, and in 2012 traveled to Los Angeles to compete in the World Championship of Performing Arts. By then Mailer was all in on an acting career. Then, in 2013, she made the ballsy decision to attend the New York Conservatory of Dramatic Arts, moving cross-country to follow her dream. In the spirit of the conservatory’s founder, Joan See, she earned her Associate Degree in Film/TV Performance, graduating in 2015 and cutting her teeth in modeling, commercials, and small roles in film and television. All of it building to her star turn in DieRy.
“I was very fortunate to have Jen as my director,” Mailer says. “I’ve basically known her my whole New York life. Jen’s been like a surrogate mother to me. She took me under her wing and looked after me in a way that I never expected. It really helped when it came to doing this film.”
Photo Courtesy Mailer Tuchman Media
Watching DieRy, it’s readily apparent that the pair’s real-life chemistry translates to what’s happening on the screen.
“Jen could literally give me a look after a take, and I would know what she needed from it. I would say, ‘How was that?’ and without a word I understood what I needed to do the next time. It just became so effortless.”
“I didn’t really have to direct her,” adds Gelfer. “And that’s a director’s dream. Brian De Palma once said that film is 90% about casting. With Claudia, the first day I was blown away because I didn’t have to do much. She just got it. I’d switch the scene around, or I’d change the dialog for another actor, and two minutes later Claudia would have the whole scene in her head, and instinctively knew how to play it. It was unbelievable. She could go with anything that you threw at her.”
Photo Courtesy Claudia Maree Mailer
That doesn’t mean that Mailer, blessed with a photographic memory, didn’t encounter challenges along the way.
“This is my first lead, so I knew that I was in the majority of the scenes,” Mailer says. “The challenge was to create a compelling character arc where you wanted to follow her…you liked her, you were on her side, you went through all of the struggles with her, and you wanted her to come out okay at the end. The hardest part was not revealing too much about her past. In order to accomplish that, Jen advised me to go against what was on the page. In other words, try not to give away anything, so that the reveal at the end is something that is rewarding for everyone.”
When you realize just how bad things are in Hollywood right now – how stifling and airless and cautious the atmosphere is, how little nourishment or encouragement a good new idea receives, and how devoid of ambition the horizon currently appears – it’s refreshing to cast your gaze toward companies like Mailer Tuchman Media, where creative risks and daring scripts are the rule, rather than the exception.
If the company name resonates, it’s because Mailer is John Buffalo Mailer, MTM’s Creative Director and the son of the late Norman Mailer, the legendary American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film-maker and actor. In a career spanning over six decades, Norman Mailer had 11 best-selling books, at least one in each of the seven decades after World War II – more than any other post-war American writer – and won two Pulitzer Prizes along the way.
Photo Courtesy Mailer Tuchman Media
His father’s is a long shadow cast by any measure, but John Buffalo Mailer has bravely charted his own course, embracing the Mailer legacy while doing the rest on his own steam. In October of 2000 he founded Back House Productions, which developed several plays, including the 2008 Tony Award Winner for Best Musical, In The Heights, by Lin-Manuel Miranda. He has been published in three books of collected essays, has published two plays, has had four feature screenplays produced, and has been an editor for four national magazines.
As an actor, he cut his teeth at The Actors Studio at the age of twelve and went on to perform in a dozen plays in New York City throughout the 2000s. As a screen actor, Buffalo has appeared opposite Shia LaBeouf in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Paul Giamatti and Ellen Burstyn in Matthew Barney’s River Of Fundament, Tony Sirico in Friends And Romans, Alec Baldwin, Demi Moore, and Dylan McDermott in Blind (which he also wrote), Sienna Miller in Private Life Of A Modern Woman, as well as MTM’s The Second Sun.
Now, Mailer can add DieRy to his resumé. The multi-hyphenate not only wrote and produced this taut thriller, he also plays the role of Tres, the ax-wielding groundskeeper who looks after Richard’s gated estate. In another delicious twist, he also happens to be married to the star.
“Buffalo and I met on the set of Blind,” Claudia Marie Mailer says. “I remember that I was doing a coffee run, and Buffalo was sitting on the steps alone, smoking a cigarette. I don’t know what it was, but something in me clicked and I bolted up to him. I put my hand out and introduced myself, and I said, ‘Hi, I’m Claudia, nice to meet you.’ And if you know me, that is not what I do. I am so shy, and I do not go up to anyone. Interactions like that usually don’t happen, unless people come up to me. But there was just something – a force – that took over, and I still can’t explain it to this day.”
One look at them together, and you can tell that attraction is mutual.
“Buffalo and I are 100% soulmates,” Mailer says, smiling. “We were both in relationships at the time, so we were just really good friends, but from the first moment we got along famously. Then it came to a summer where we both found ourselves single, so it was like kismet. I remember telling Jen, and she was like, ‘Finally.’ [Laughs]. No one was shocked when we told them – even my dad, who had not met him yet. His attitude was, ‘Okay, cool. It’s about time.’”
While some might wonder if working on a feature film together might stress the newlywed’s relationship, Mailer laughs at the thought.
“Buffalo is incredible,” she says quickly. “We are like two peas in a pod, and we get along so well, so there wasn’t any conflict at all. With COVID-19 and the quarantine, we have been together nonstop since the outbreak. That hasn’t been hard on either of us: We enjoy each other so much that I might go for a 20-minute walk by myself and end up with separation anxiety. So, working together on a film like DieRy was a blessing. What we have is amazing. He is amazing. Okay, now I’m blushing [laughs].”
Funny thing about those OOTD photos on Claudia Maree Mailer’s Instagram feed: They cleverly serve two purposes. First, they are part of the journey that her followers get to take with her, moments big and small, images of ordinary life mixed with her professional journey as an actor. Then there are the hidden Easter eggs with a direct tie-in to DieRy – snapshots that not only reflect a day-in-the-life of Claudia Maree Mailer, but that also serve as hooks to her character in the film, Marie Clark. It’s an intelligent bit of blending, the real world fused with the imaginary, life imitating art.
Photo Courtesy Claudia Maree Mailer
“My generation was the last to grow up and have social media enter our lives, as opposed to it already being there,” Mailer says. “It completely takes over. You completely blur the lines between what’s real and what’s not, what’s for public consumption and what’s private. It was definitely interesting to put it into a movie and show a direct consequence of putting so much of your life online.”
Claudia Marie Mailer is going places.
Maybe not now, with COVID raging, but then again we’re not speaking literally. DieRy is one helluva debut for an actor on the precipice, and certain to juice her Q-Rating. She’s busy doing the PR work now, a victory lap after the grind of getting this film made. She has two more films in the works, Inside Me and The Best Friend. She’s leveling up with each role, turning heads, kicking ass.
The best part?
We get to go on this amazing ride with her.