Phoebe Tonkin’s experience on the set of “Bait 3D” was fun, wet and cold. “I [wasn’t sure] how it was going to work…but it was the most amazing set I’d ever seen,” she said when describing the crazy supermarket set. “It was literally like they had gotten a supermarket and just put it in a pool…It was so detailed…It was a pretty incredible set they created.”
Tonkin plays Jaimie, a teenage girl who is working out some past issues. “She lost her mom a couple of years ago and she kind of disappeared for a while,” Tonkin said. “She goes through a great arc throughout the film. She grows up a little bit and learns…not to take her family and her dad for granted anymore.”
If she was in her character’s situation, Tonkin hopes she would act courageous like her character. “I don’t know, it was such an extreme situation,” she said. “Jaime is a fighter throughout the film. One of the guys in the film–he hurts his leg and he can’t swim [and help them] get something to help them fish out the shark, so Jamie decides to almost sacrifice herself in a way because it’s a big risk. I definitely think I would hope I’d do something similar to that…and to fight my way out of there.”
Working with the director, Kimble Rendall, and the cast was great, said Tonkin. “Kimble was great, he’s hilarious. He definitely kept the morale up amongst us. We were on the set for 12 hours a day, covered in water. He was playing music on the loudspeakers, sometimes in between takes, [keeping] our energy up.”
“The cast was hilarious. I mean, Dan Wyllie is one of the most hilarious people I’ve ever met in my life,” she said. “Xavier Samuel and Alex Russell are great friends. It was really fun. If everyone didn’t have such great personalities and were such hard workers, it would have been a lot harder.”
Tonkin believes the popularity of shark movies comes from fear. “I guess it’s the fear of the unknown. Everyone goes swimming and everyone’s in the ocean. It’s not every day that everyone’s going down dark alleys or in the forest by themselves,” she said. “When you’re in the ocean, there is a chance that something bad could happen because you don’t know what’s underneath you.”
Tonkin can be seen in the fourth season of “The Vampire Diaries” on the CW. “Bait 3D” comes to DVD and Blu-ray September 18.
