Taking shelter at home can be a terrible experience, so actors Amy Acker (Suits, Angel) and her husband James Carpinello (The Blacklist, The Enemy Within) made the decision to capture the feeling on video. For two weeks because of the pandemic, the Los Angeles couple made a short film about a woman who begins to question her husband’s risks to stay home. But why? Is there really a mysterious risk waiting outside your door? Or does he just have her prisoner?
The result is Outside, a 14-minute film that not only stars Acker and Carpinello, but was written, filmed and produced through the couple without a budget and only with an iPhone (and an old one too). “We were constantly scared,” Acker told EW. “This is James’s 7-year-old iPhone, maybe 8 years old. We thought, ‘This is going to blow up your phone…’ There was a lot of content.”
Carpinello adds: “With the kids at Zoom School, we thought, ‘We have to do something,’ and I think we were motivated by the fact that ‘Oh, this shelter at home will end in a few weeks,’ so we deserve the paintings to take it down.
This didn’t happen, of course, but it gave them more time to improve their little thriller. The couple trusted their friend/publisher Tommy Aagaard, while their friend Justin Stanley provided a tense score for their combat scenes. (Yes, Acker throws her husband down the stairs.) They also had the assistance of sound designer Jack Whittaker and sound mixer Lucas Miller.
“The real gift of all is that we have friends and many other people who are artistic and need to do things in this age where everything has been slow,” says Acker. “We felt guilty of asking other people, but everyone we talked to was very excited.”
In addition to giving EW the first exclusive look, the couple, who married in 2003 but did not paint in combination until the 2014 film Let’s Kill Ward’s Wife with Scott Foley, is now considering bringing his quarantine on the festival circuit.
“We say we’re going to do anything together, and there’s a million and an explanation for why we don’t,” Carpinello says. “The kind of life takes over. Actually, it was a moment when life had literally slowed down. In fact, we had time. So it was like, ‘Come on.'”
Related content: