Adam Driver.Photo: Stephane Cardinale - Corbis/Corbis via Getty
Adam Driveris reflecting on the “bizarre coincidence” between what happens in his filmWhite Noiseand the real-life train derailment last month in Ohio.
“It’sa very eerie, bizarre coincidencethat we were just there making this movie, and some people, who were actually in our movie, were then enacting it in real life,” the 39-year-old65actor toldThe Hollywood Reporterin an interview published Wednesday.
The real accident runs strangely parallel to the premise ofWhite Noise, the film adaptation ofDon DeLillo’s 1985 novelnow streaming on Netflix about a freight-train explosion that releases deadly toxins into the air.
“I don’t have a frame of reference to process that,” Driver said. “It’s a terrifying thing that happened and is happening, and to oddly have some distant connection with it is strange.”
Life for nearly half of the residents in the Ohio village of East Palestine (population over 4,700), located about 50 miles from Pittsburgh, was upended around 9 p.m. on Feb. 3, when50 rail cars filled with chemicals and combustible materials ran off the track.
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Train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.Gene J Puskar/AP/Shutterstock
One of those chemicals was vinyl chloride, a toxic flammable gas. And shortly after the derailment, a massive fire erupted, sending enormous clouds of pitch-black smoke into the air, forcing evacuations on both sides of the Ohio-Pennsylvania border.
Two days later officials were so fearful that the rail cars filled with vinyl chloride would explode, potentially sending shrapnel over a mile-wide radius, that they vented the chemical into a trench and burned it.
By Feb. 23, officials estimated that the chemical spill likelykilled over 43,000 aquatic animalswithin a 5-mile radius. Around the same time, locals were beingdiagnosed with bronchitis and other health conditionsdue to the chemical exposure.
Part ofWhite Noisewas shot near the same area in Ohio,which Driver toldTHR"was very generous to our production when we were shooting there; and a big part of our film is how nebulous information can get when there’s no clear plan in place to quickly address situations like this."
“So I hope they get the proper attention and answers, safety and accountability they are looking for,” the two-timeOscarnominee added.
Adam Driver inWhite Noise(2022).Wilson Webb/Netflix
Ten days after the real-life accident, Ohio resident Ben Ratner, who plays an evacuee extra inWhite Noise, spoke to PEOPLE aboutliving out a real-life version of the movie’s plot.
“Talk about art imitating life,” the father of four, 37, said last month. “This is such a scary situation. And you can just about drive yourself crazy thinking about how uncanny the similarities arebetween what’s happening nowand in that movie.”
Ratner, along with his wife and kids, spent eight days living with friends, relatives and in an Airbnb property before finally returning home three days after the evacuation order was finally lifted.
“We still need answers about how to keep our families safe while also maintaining some sort of a regular existence for our kids,” he added.
source: people.com
