To find immortality, Natalie Portman and John Krasinski first had to survive a white-knuckle car chase.
In director Guy Ritchie’s “Fountain of Youth” (streaming now on Apple TV+), a globetrotting adventure in the “Indiana Jones” and “National Treasure” mold, the two A-listers play estranged siblings seeking the titular mythical spring. Early in the process, their characters find themselves being pursued through London at high speeds by cop cars, with Krasinski behind the wheel of a slick Shelby Cobra.
Well, not technically. He and Portman acted in a pod car built for close-ups while stunt drivers did all the heavy lifting with the actual muscle car seen in wide shots. “The stunt guys were like, ‘If you asked us to drive this (yourself), you would die. … But the one you and Natalie are in, pffft, we’ve built it to be like a Volvo,’ ” Krasinski says. “And I was like, ‘Great. That sounds like safety.’
“But I will say all those reactions are genuine. No one told us how fast we were going to go.”
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Adds Portman: “I definitely was wishing I could wear a helmet. I was genuinely just screaming my head off. It was crazy.”
Both actors have played in franchise sandboxes before: Portman starred as Padmé Amidala in the
“Star Wars” prequels and appeared as Thor’s love interest Jane Foster in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where “A Quiet Place” mastermind Krasinski stopped by as Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four. But “Fountain of Youth” offered the chance to be on the ground floor of a potential new series intended for families.
“It’s really fun to come in and get to imagine these characters without inheriting a legacy of something,” Portman says.
After his first costume fitting, Krasinski remembers calling his wife Emily Blunt while strolling through the production office. “I went, ‘This is huge!’ ” he says. “I was scared, and then as soon as we started, it almost felt like the gates were open for just real collaboration.”
But Luke (Krasinski) and Charlotte Purdue (Portman), who enjoyed a life of adventure before going their separate ways after their father’s death, are very clearly not on the same page in the early goings-on of “Fountain of Youth.” She’s a gallery curator in London when her art-thief older brother shows up and steals a painting.
It’s for a good cause, though. Luke has been hired by a tech billionaire (Domhnall Gleeson) to locate the Fountain of Youth, a legendary locale the siblings’ dad always wanted to find, and hidden messages on the back of six masterpieces hold the key to getting there.
Working with Ritchie “definitely provided a lot of that dynamic of this brother who’s a little wilder (and) the sister who’s a little bit more sensible and responsible,” Portman says. “And of course, the one who had an impact on both of them, this father that was extremely wild and adventurous. One has kind of followed in his path and the other has driven her personality in antithesis to her father.”
Luke brings out a less buttoned-up side of Charlotte, who’s gone through a messy divorce and brings her 12-year-old son (Benjamin Chivers) on their adventure. And Charlotte constantly reminds Luke not to steal artifacts he doesn’t need. One of Krasinski’s favorite parts of the movie was “this whole idea of touching it, but not taking,” he says.
“Fountain of Youth” digs into real history, and Portman learned about things she “had never heard of before,” like the Wicked Bible, Rembrandt’s copies of his own works, and masterpieces that sank with the torpedoed Lusitania in 1915.
“I was like, ‘Wait, where’s the Lusitania?!’ ” she says, noting that screenwriter James Vanderbilt threw in a detail from his own family history. (The Purdues have to break into a waterproof safe that belonged to Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, the writer’s real-life great-grandfather, who died aboard the ship.)
What mythic locale or priceless artifact will the Purdues pursue next? “Let’s see if people want a sequel first,” Portman cracks. But Krasinski thinks there’s a certain nostalgia factor that will bring youngsters to “Fountain of Youth.”
“I just recently watched ‘Back to the Future’ for the first time with my oldest daughter, and you could just sense something in the room. There was a promise that was being made with that movie to her that she hadn’t had in a long time, if ever – maybe the ‘Harry Potter’ movies or something,” Krasinski says. “There was a superpower to those movies that we grew up with, and I hope we get to keep bringing them back.
“It’s so hard to find something that we can all watch as a family where it’s not too young for us, it’s not too adult for them, and that everybody enjoys it. And this hopefully is one of them.”
