Swim At Your Own Risk – Swim Fan interview

Thanks to Christina Radish for sharing this with Crashdown readers

From: Film Stew

Swim At Your Own Risk

Actors Jesse Bradford, Erika Christensen and Shiri Appleby, along with director John Polson, chat about taking the plunge for the thriller, Swimfan.

By Christina Radish

One mistake can change your entire life in a split second. At least that’s what Ben Cronin (as played by Jess Bradford) learns in the teen thriller Swimfan. Ben has it all: the admiration of his friends, a terrific girlfriend, and he’s on the fast-track to an athletic scholarship. His rock-solid, promising future and romance with Amy (Shiri Appleby) heads south with the arrival of Madison Bell (Erika Christensen). The new girl in town quickly sets her sights on the impressionable Ben and, while their first few meetings are innocent enough, the seductive Madison soon wants more. And seducing Ben is only the beginning, for she soon becomes his biggest fan and most unexpected nightmare, as her obsessions quickly spiral out of control and into betrayal, madness and, ultimately, murder.

Even though he had just completed work on Clockstoppers and was not eager to jump into another project right away, 23-year-old actor Jesse Bradford quickly changed his mind after reading the Swimfan screenplay and realizing what a challenge the role would be. “I went through significant swimming training,” he says. “I swam every day as soon as I found out that I was doing the movie and it looked like it was going to come together, I got in the pool. That was a month and a half before we even started shooting.”

“Every single day, I went to the gym and swam for an hour or so,” he continues. “I probably started off at 20 minutes because I could barely do it at first. And that’s not to say that I didn’t know how to swim, but it’s different. Swimming is different than plowing along, doing lap after lap. I would get exhausted after six laps and need a break. I felt like there’s a big difference between the way a guy who spends all day in the gym looks, and the way a guy who spends all day in the pool looks, so the only way to do it was to really swim. Whereas, I started off taking a break after a couple laps, I ended up reaching a point where I could do 70 laps straight, without a break, not at an Olympic pace, obviously, but nonetheless, it was arduous, so I trained hard.”

Bradford was so focused on appearing like a professional swimmer that he actually worked with three separate trainers. “One guy was a personal swimming coach named Eric, and then, the guy who helped me the most, was the Columbia University swimming coach,” the actor recounts.

For the rest of the interview check out the website here.