Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes Had Darker Ending, Says Freya Allan

[This story contains spoilers for Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.]

Wes Ball’s Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is not just an ape story like the Caesar-led Apes trilogy of the 2010s. Kingdom is just as much a human story, and Freya Allan’s Mae is the human in that equation. Centuries after Caesar’s (Andy Serkis) death, Mae first crosses paths with Owen Teague’s young chimpanzee, Noa, as she attempts to survive in the wilderness alone. However, she inadvertently leads Proximus Caesar’s (Kevin Durand) coastal clan of hostile apes to Noa’s village, and the communal home of his Eagle Clan is subsequently destroyed, while many of his fellow apes and family members are either slaughtered or abducted.

Noa narrowly survives the attack and makes the trek to the coast in order to rescue his loved ones, before encountering a wise orangutan named Raka (Peter Macon). Together, they welcome the skittish Mae into their camp, assuming that she’s feral and can’t speak. Raka even refers to her as Nova à la Amiah Miller’s Nova in Matt Reeves’ War for the Planet of the Apes (2017), but when push comes to shove, Mae reveals her given name, proving that she’s both highly intelligent and calculating.

Allan and Ball both went through production with the intention of only presenting Mae as the feral, mute Nova during the marketing and promotion of the film, but then the final round of TV spots and trailers let the cat out of the bag.

“I prepped myself that I was going to have to figure out a way to lie to everybody throughout press. I know that Wes [Ball] didn’t want that to be revealed, and it’s understandable because we worked very hard to make that believable when we were shooting,” Allan tells The Hollywood Reporter. “So I do think that it’s a bit of a shame that it’s already been spoiled, but hopefully, the people who don’t know, who haven’t seen all the clips and things, can still be surprised by it.”

Mae and Noa are eventually captured by Proximus Caesar and taken to his coastal base alongside a locked vault filled with human technology, weapons and intelligence. If Proximus is able to gain access to its contents, he would cement the apes’ dominance for even more generations, so he wastes no time trying to recruit Noa into his effort by pitting him against Mae. He informs Noa that Mae wasn’t forthcoming about the group of humans she was once traveling with in order to retrieve something from the nearby silo. Angered by her dishonesty, Noa still decides to help Mae get inside the vault if it means he can free his enslaved Eagle Clan from Proximus. 

Their plan works out long enough for Mae to grab the decryption key that will allow humans around the country, if not the world, to communicate once more and potentially mobilize. But on their way out of the vault, Proxmius has them surrounded until Mae makes the bold decision to blow open the floodgates, destroying not only the items in the vault but also killing hundreds of apes who served Proximus, both willingly and unwillingly. 

“It’s not what she wants to do. But it’s that, or Proximus has all these weapons and humanity is screwed. She’s gone through so much, she’s lost all the people she cares about, which was a large part of how I justified everything that she did,” Allan says. “So she can’t throw that away at the last minute because of this one ape [Noa]. In that moment, I know that Mae hopes that he’s going to be okay. But what else could she do? It’s not easy, but that’s the point.”

Eventually, Mae returns to the Eagle Clan village to see that Noa survived the flood and his showdown with Proxiumus, but in a chilling reveal, the audience is shown that she’s holding a gun behind her back in case Noa wants vengeance for all the innocent apes she killed. While the act comes off as precautionary, Allan played it quite differently on the day as the scene was reconceived in the editing room.

“In the scene that I shot, Mae was going there to kill him because he scares her. His intelligence scares her. Mae doesn’t want to kill him, but she feels she has to … Originally, you actually see her pull the gun on Noa, but his back is turned to her. And so you think, ‘Oh my God, is she about to shoot him?’ Mae is crying as she’s doing it … And then she doesn’t. The minute he mentions Raka’s name, she puts the gun down,” Allan recalls. “But then in the edit, they wanted it to feel more subtle, and I honestly way prefer what they’ve done with it. It’s so much smarter and really allows you to think more … So it becomes a very emotional goodbye, one with tragic, lingering doom.”

Below, during a recent conversation with THR, Allan looks ahead to a potential sequel to Kingdom, before previewing her storyline on season four of her hit Netflix series, The Witcher.

So when you put yourself on tape, did you have to do one scene of nonverbal smoldering as well as one dialogue scene? 

It was a dialogue scene, but in the [casting/character] breakdown, they originally made it sound like she was almost an alien. So I very much played her in a bizarre way. I was playing her as an actual feral that could speak rather than an intelligent human pretending to be a feral, because that’s how it was made out to be in the breakdown.

And how many hoops did you have to jump through after your first tape?

It went silent for quite a while, and I honestly forgot about it until my agent called me one day when I was coming back from set. He said that they hadn’t found what they were looking for and that the casting director had gone back to look at my tapes and that she wanted to Zoom call with me. So I did a Zoom audition with [casting director] Debra Zane, and I felt like it went really well. And then I did a chemistry read over Zoom with Owen [Teague], and Wes [Ball] was on there as well. But I also knew that the other girls were doing it in person, so I thought, “Oh, this is just not going to work out because it’s over Zoom.” But Owen and I just really, really clicked, and we’ve both said that we forgot that there was a screen between us. And then I found out that they wanted to fly me out to Australia. So I wrapped up season three of The Witcher, and I flew straight to Australia less than 24 hours later to do the screen test over there.

Were you expecting the marketing to reveal that Mae can talk in coherent sentences?

No, honestly! I prepped myself that I was going to have to figure out a way to lie to everybody throughout press. I know that Wes didn’t want that to be revealed, and it’s understandable because we worked very hard to make that believable when we were shooting. So I do think that it’s a bit of a shame that it’s already been spoiled, but hopefully, the people who don’t know, who haven’t seen all the clips and things, can still be surprised by it.

Is this still the most nonverbal work you’ve ever done? 

No, I played a Christmas tree, which someone reminded me of the other day. I’d completely forgotten that I played a Christmas tree and didn’t say anything. 

Was this on stage?

No, in an ad that I hope no one finds. (Laughs.) 

There’s a big chunk of this movie where you were the only actor who wasn’t wearing a mocap suit. Did you feel like the cool kid for having an actual costume, or did you feel left out of the mocap fun?

I definitely felt cooler because what they were doing felt so silly, initially, but I have massive respect for what they all did, of course. It did feel special to me that I was getting to be the looking glass for viewers, because Mae is obviously a human as most of the viewers, I presume, are of the film. (Laughs.) So that felt quite special, and to be holding the weight of humanity on my shoulders, I felt honored to actually be playing the human character. 

All the ape actors went to an ape boot camp, but did they offer you some sort of feral boot camp? 

Well, it was interesting because it was about striking a balance. She’s obviously pretending to be a feral human, but she hasn’t actually seen a feral human [until a particular sequence midway through the movie], so she’s maybe going off what other people have told her or what she would imagine them to be like. So it was about striking the balance between not making it too perfect in that way and just going back to my childhood of pretending to be an animal and being a rabbit in the headlights. I’m sure that’s how Mae actually felt anyway by being so close to the apes, and she’s obviously trying to convince them that she is unintelligent, initially. So I did work a little bit with [movement coordinator] Alain [Gauthier]. I had Owen come in and chuck me some fruit, and then I’d crawl out and eat my fruit like a little animal. Alain also told me how he was designing the feral humans’ physicality and run, but I was very sure that I didn’t want it to be that specific for her. She’s not feral, and she doesn’t know that much about them and she doesn’t have someone like Alain telling her how to be a feral human. So you need to see those small moments where you go, “She’s not the same as the other humans.”

When we meet her, she looks rather mucky and unclean. She should’ve grabbed some Dove Body Wash from the vault. 

(Laughs.) Yeah.

Were you joking about going method for this character detail?

Everyone keeps saying I went method; I must have made some joke about it early on, but I’m not method. Of course, having dirt all over me helped get into character, but I basically just couldn’t be bothered to take off the dirt every day. So there were days where I went home or to the hotel with the patches of dirt still on my legs, because it just took so much time to make my whole body dirty. I was like, “I can’t do this every time.” So my sheets looked hideous, and my toenails were just disgusting the whole six months. I’d go to the beach on the weekend, and I’d be so self-conscious of people staring at my feet because they literally were stained black and still had [fake] blood on them. I couldn’t get it out.

Wes and I talked about how he’s releasing the mocap cut on the Blu-ray. Are you eager for us to see the perspective that you saw on the day? 

Yeah, I think it would be amazing. The apes really are everything that the actors have done, and without people fully understanding how that works, they might not be as appreciated. They’ve worked so hard, and they deserve to be appreciated. So it’s amazing that Wes is going to show that. It’ll be funny as well if they include some of the stuff where I had to act on my own, because I really looked so stupid.

[Writer’s Note: Spoilers begin for the next seven questions.]

So I’ve been rethinking Mae’s entire arc since I saw the movie, and I’ve been wondering how premeditated her actions were. Did she feign ignorance so that Noa would be more inclined to protect her and ultimately help her fulfill her mission to retrieve the decryption key? How much was premeditated versus impromptu?

I think it was a mixture. Certain things were premeditated, but a lot of it she figures out as she goes, because it was never her plan in the first place to end up in this situation. You see her running in the wilderness, and she’s basically listening and seeing what Noa is like and trying to decide whether it’s safe enough to go near him. She initially decides to pretend to be feral because she knows that she’s a threat to them, and she doesn’t know what they’ll do to her if she reveals herself. And in the short time she’s around them, she sees the humanity in them. She’s then put in a situation where she has to speak, and so her plan of not speaking is gone, but she probably would’ve had to speak in the end anyway, in order to help them.

But she is using them in order to help herself. She knows that if she is backed up by the apes and by Noa, then she’s going to be more likely to accomplish her mission. So she has to convince him that they’re on the same team, but then the lines are blurred. They go on this journey together and she sees his humanity, and so they do in a way become a team. But she has her own motives, and ultimately, they’re not on the same team.

So she’s got to keep certain things from him, because she doesn’t know what his reaction will be. She doesn’t know if he would want to be her teammate on this mission anymore if she was to reveal all her truths, and so it does make sense that she keeps a lot of it to herself. A large part is just not wanting to say too much, but just enough for him to see something in her. So she is cunning and manipulative, but it’s only to be expected. What else is she supposed to do? Just tell him instantly that she wants to reconnect the humans of the entire planet? Obviously not. 

Yeah, my assumption was that she was assigned this mission to procure the decryption key, and she knew she needed an ape to help her pull it off.

Well, originally, she went with a camp, so she was backed. She was going with people, and this [team-up with the apes] was not the plan. Her camp was attacked, and all those people died. So she’s the only one left, and she’s fully out in the wilderness with nothing and no one. So she has to resort to making Noa her teammate because she’s got no one else. That was not the plan, though, so a lot of it is gradually figuring what to do next.

Despite the apes having control of the planet, she hasn’t given up on humanity yet. We didn’t know why she refused to bend the knee to Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand) in the moment, but in hindsight, it’s because she knows that there are pockets of humans stationed around the country and likely mobilizing?

Number one, she refuses to give up on humanity because her camp died, and within that camp there were people she really cared about. So Proximus’ apes killed her camp, similarly to Noa’s, which is what’s so bizarre about it. I also created a backstory that her parents had also gone off and tried to do the same mission, but they never came back and presumably died. She doesn’t know. So she’s basically doing this for the people that she loves, and that happens to involve the whole of humanity as well. So all she’s left with is this mission, and because so many people that she loves have died, that’s what I largely stemmed it off.

When she shows up at the end to part ways with Noa, a chill went down my spine when it’s revealed that she’s holding a gun behind her back. Was that merely a precaution in case he wanted revenge for her drowning a bunch of apes? She didn’t travel there to kill him, right?

Let me give you an insider there. That scene was so different. Well, not so different, the main premise is still the same. Originally, you actually see her pull the gun on Noa, but his back is turned to her. And so you think, “Oh my God, is she about to shoot him?” And Mae is crying as she’s doing it, like, “Am I about to shoot him?” And then she doesn’t. The minute he mentions Raka’s name, she puts the gun down. 

But then in the edit, they wanted it to feel more subtle, and I honestly way prefer what they’ve done with it. It’s so much smarter and really allows you to think more. It doesn’t need to be as obvious as holding up the gun, and it allows you to raise the questions you just asked: Was she going there to kill them, or was it a precaution? So that’s up for you to decide, because the scene that I shot was so different. 

In the scene that I shot, Mae was going there to kill him because he scares her. His intelligence scares her. Mae doesn’t want to kill him, but she feels she has to. And in that moment, she can’t. She’s done so many brutal things, but she can’t pull that trigger. So it becomes a very emotional goodbye, one with tragic, lingering doom. So that’s what I shot, but that’s the amazing thing about editing. You can change it and make it more up for interpretation. 

So when you sat down to watch the movie for the first time, did you say to yourself, “Wait, that’s not what I shot”?

I could see that the producers were nervous to show me the scene, because I think they were worried that I would be upset about it, but I was the complete opposite. I thought it was such a smart move, and usually with editing, they can go into a realm of trying to make things too obvious. “Can you ADR this line? Can we add this? Can we make this happen? Because this isn’t clear, this isn’t clear.” And it’s thinking that the viewers are idiots or that everything has to be spelled out. So I love that they actually decided to make it more up for interpretation, and allow viewers to think what you asked me: Was she going there to kill him, or was she doing it as a precaution? You don’t know.

As far as her opening the floodgates to ruin the contents of the vault, how did you justify her added decision to kill not only a bunch of bad apes, but also plenty of innocent ones who were enslaved by Proximus?

In that moment, she cannot let Proximus get the stuff that is inside there. She just can’t. There’s helicopters, there’s guns, there’s bombs. Everything is in there. The humans’ chances would suddenly get even worse, and they already aren’t great. So it’s a moment where Mae has taken the one weapon she can, but [opening the floodgates to kill apes] was not the plan. It’s not what she wants to do. But it’s that, or Proximus has all these weapons and humanity is screwed. So that was how I justified it. She’s gone through so much, she’s lost all the people she cares about, which was a large part of how I justified everything that she did. So she can’t throw that away at the last minute because of this one ape [Noa]. In that moment, I know that Mae hopes that he’s going to be okay. You can see in her face that it’s not easy. She’s thinking, “What do I do?” But what else could she do? Throw away everything she’s just gone through? Throw away the deaths of the people that she cared about? So that’s what it lands on. It’s not easy, but that’s the point.

The last Apes trilogy didn’t bring back any of the same human characters, and while I was initially worried that this potential trilogy would follow suit, Wes told me that there’s a larger plan that very much includes Mae. Are you champing at the bit to pick things back up, especially after that tantalizing ending? 

I would love to, largely because I love working with Owen and Wes, but also because the film feels like a setup for more. So it is going to be really interesting if we get the chance to see where these characters go based on what they’ve learned in this film. There’s such a theme of everything that they’ve ever known being completely challenged, and I really want to see what they then do with what they’ve learned and where that takes them and how the things that they’ve gone through affect them. So, yeah, I would love to return.

Your other job on The Witcher just started back up again. How’s the new dynamic so far on season four?

I’m really excited because I’m with a whole new group of actors, and they are playing this gang called The Rats. That storyline is one that I’ve been waiting on for a while because it’s the biggest turn for Ciri. She goes into a very dark place, but she is also discovering so many things within that gang. And so it’s the best Ciri storyline, I think. So I’m actually really excited to be starting, and the stuff we’ve shot already is really exciting as an actor. Our director for the first block is also really great, which is so lovely to have. 

Going back to the series premiere, they really cast you in a small role, only to then say, “Never mind, we’re going to make you co-lead”?

I auditioned for Ciri, and I left thinking, “This role is for me.” When I googled her, I was like, “Oh my God, she looks like me. Maybe this is going to all align.” And while the casting directors really liked me, they sent this email two days later saying that I couldn’t have the role because they decided to change the breakdown of the character. Basically, I wasn’t the right look for her anymore, so that made me really upset because I thought it was perfect. But then they were like, “We still really want you in the show, so will you audition for this character?” And then they told me the next day that I got that character, which was a character who’s only in episode one. 

And then my mum showed up at my school, and I was like, “What are you doing here?” And she was like, “They actually want you to come back and audition for Ciri tomorrow.” So she knew how much it meant to me, and that’s why she showed up at my school. The minute I saw her, I was like, “This has got to be something important. Why else is she at my school?” So I went in the next day, and it was me against another girl. And then they teared up in the audition and gave me a hug, and that’s when I knew I kind of had it. But I still had to do the agonizing wait while it went through all the people at the top, and then I found out the day before my birthday that I got it.

Decades from now, when you reminisce about the making of Kingdom, what day will you tell your loved ones about first? 

Oh wow. There are so many that it’s difficult to pick one. Being with all the cast was so special, but my last shot of the film, not scene, was out on this location in the middle of nowhere. It was the furthest I traveled, and it was just me on my own. Wes was obviously there, and it was just completely remote. You literally couldn’t see anything around you in this grass, and the sun started coming down as we were doing this shot where the camera pushes into Mae’s face. Mae is looking up at the [satellites] that are connecting all the humans, and I was imagining them lighting up. So she was finally able to breathe, realizing she’s completed her mission. It sounds really corny, but that’s also how I was feeling. I was like, “Wow, the sunset is coming down. I’ve completed my mission as Freya, and Mae’s completed her mission as Mae.” And the setting was just so peaceful in that moment. So that was something magical that I’ve not said in any interview. It was a lovely moment. 

***Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is now playing exclusively in movie theaters.