Chilling with Numb star Stefanie von Pfetten

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      Stefanie von Pfetten lives in Beachwood Canyon in the hills of L.A., just down the road from Ned Beatty and Moby and within walking distance of the Hollywood sign. But she eagerly ditched her balmy paradise to come up here and shoot the coldest-looking movie you’ve seen since the last one (and the last one was The Revenant).

      The Vancouver-born actor spends roughly two-thirds of the locally-made thriller Numb hauling herself across the ice planet Hoth—more familiar to us as rural B.C.—looking for buried gold in skinny jeans and an adorable little winter coat. It looks miserable.

      “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, absolutely. Not just physically, but emotionally,” says von Pfetten, calling the Straight from her home back in Hollywoodland. “When you’re working on time and budget constraints, there’s no going back to your trailer to get warm. We were in a remote location so basically crew and cast alike had to suffer the elements most of the time.”

      Von Pfetten notes that her co-stars Aleks Paunovic and Marie Avgeropoulos might have had it worse—“She hardly even had a coat and was wearing, like, a lingerie top underneath,” she says—but who wants to split hairs when you’re being gently cajoled back onto a sub-zero set by an alarmed make-up artist?

      “The words ‘I don’t think I can’ have never, ever come out of my mouth,” says von Pfetten, with a laugh, “but they did this time. I’m from good German stock, I’m a tough chick, and I was crying. But I did it, of course—I never would not.”

      Directed by Jason R. Goode, making his impressive feature debut, Numb is a neat and nasty thriller with a particularly timely theme for Vancouverites. Von Pfetten and Jamie Bamber are the cash-strapped couple looking for that gold, along with Paunovic and Avgeropoulos's faintly menacing hitchhikers. It’s a story we’ve seen a thousand times, but Numb is more about desperation than greed.

      “When I read the script and talked to Jason about it, I said it’s really important that she’s likeable,” says von Pfetten, speaking about her character, Dawn. “I didn’t want people to watch the movie and think, ‘What a bitch.’ I really didn’t want her to be judged, because people do what they do to survive, and I truly believe that as humans we do the best we can. And I think that’s what Dawn did. She thought she was doing the right thing.”

      In turn, von Pfetten brings just the right degree of sympathy to Dawn. It was Paunovic who recommended her to Goode for the role, which she managed to get without an audition (”That was nice!” she says.) It’s probably worth mentioning, as von Pfetten does, that Paunovic was aware of her family’s aristocratic background, which is described at length in her wild IMDb profile (her full name is Stefanie Baroness Christina von Pfetten.) Does she ever feel like she’s been cheated out of her place in the nobility?

      “Well, it doesn’t really exist anymore,” she answers with a broad laugh. “But do I feel cheated out of being born in a different time period? Totally! Are you kidding me?”

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