Michael Rymer wasn’t familiar with Aaliyah before casting her in Queen of the Damned, but he didn’t need much convincing.
“I flew to Vancouver from Toronto just for an overnight [stay] to have dinner with Aaliyah,” the director, 63, exclusively tells Us on the 25th anniversary of the “Try Again” singer’s tragic death. “I met her and her brother, Rashad [Haughton], and we went to their favorite little Italian joint ’round the corner and had a really nice dinner and talked about the books [The Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice, on which the 2002 horror film was based].”
Rymer remembers warning Aaliyah that the role of Akasha would be a “challenging” one that was “way outside” the work she had been doing in the music industry. Nonetheless, he invited her to do a screen test, which she eagerly accepted.
“She said, ‘Absolutely. I want you to have complete faith [in me], and I will work hard and as long as it takes,’” the filmmaker shares.
Rymer admits to Us that he put Aaliyah “through the wringer” during her audition because he “really wanted to challenge” her.
“She’s playing a 2000-year-old Egyptian queen, so we broke it down into what you’d call external impediments,” he explains. “She learned a very Egyptian accent. She took on the physicality of a big cat. We do these exercises where she’s stalking around like a cat. Then I gave her a monologue. The script was not in great shape when we were at that point … so I took quite a long scene out of Oscar Wilde‘s play Salome, which demanded the head of John the Baptist. She learned about a five-minute section of that.”
Once Aaliyah landed the role, Rymer knew he made the right decision.
“She had no ego. She was a professional who worked. There was no limit to the amount of work that she would put into something,” he recalls. “I got to know her very well over the six months we made the film, and she was incredibly focused and positive. There was never any petulance. She was just a very mature young woman.”
In fact, Aaliyah was nothing short of a consummate professional while preparing for one of the movie’s most intense scenes.
“I don’t think I’ve ever talked about this, but we had to cast her body for when she was a statue, and that is quite a difficult, stressful thing to do,” Rymer reveals. “She’s covered in plaster and has to sit perfectly still until the plaster sets, breathing through a straw in her upper nose. I sat there with her, holding her hand. She didn’t want to have to do it again, and so she was very disciplined, didn’t move an inch, and it came out right the first time.”
Queen of the Damned ultimately marked Aaliyah’s final screen appearance. She died at age 22 in a plane crash in the Bahamas on August 25, 2001, approximately six months before the film hit theaters.
“It was pretty intense,” Rymer tells Us of the moment he learned about the crash. “You just go into shock. You don’t really process these things immediately.”
While Aaliyah had completed filming her scenes for Queen of the Damned prior to her untimely death, her brother, Rashad, had to step in to help with post-production audio.
“Rashad, who knew her better than anyone, was able to give a depth and a layer, a harmony to that, to be able to keep her performance intact,” Rymer says, calling the finished product “gorgeous and fantastic” thanks to Aaliyah’s “magic” on set.
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