There was a big deal around here last year (I guess) when they were filming “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” with Emma Watson (of Harry Potter fame) as one of the stars. There’s the famous shot of her standing up in the back of the truck with her arms out, riding through the tunnel, and she’s said lots of nice things about Pittsburgh and filming here. So, I was particularly anxious to see the movie and finally did a couple of days ago.
It turns out that Nina Dobrev was also in it. I didn’t recognize her at first, and once I knew who she was, in some scenes I could definitely tell that’s who she was and other times it didn’t quite look like her.
She had a relatively small part, but when I went back to see the extras, I had the director’s commentary on while watching the deleted scenes. There was a major sequence involving her that he cut. He (Stephen Chbosky, writer of book and screenplay and director) said it was the last and hardest thing he deleted and explained why. It referred to a major plot in the book, but he explained why he decided that it wouldn’t work for the movie.
One of the reasons it was so hard for him to delete was that he thought it was the best work that Nina had done, and when he called to tell her that he was cutting it and why, he said that she so believed in the movie that she still did all the publicity and interviews. He said that that might not sound like much, but that she has “a lovely TV show that she’s doing” and didn’t need to give them so much time. He referred to it as a “rare bit of selfless caring” and said that she is a “tremendous actress and class act.”
