‘Erupcja’ Star Lena Góra Talks Warsaw and Filming With Charli XCX

It’s the day of the equinox, and Lena Góra is welcoming all that Warsaw in spring has to offer.

“Warsaw is full of flowers,” says the actress from a sunny corner of her apartment. “Everybody’s been so hungry for it. So flowers are blooming and it just feels really” — she exhales — “oh, I needed that.”

The actress has been living in Poland’s capital for several months shooting the second season of “The Eastern Gate,” and gearing up for the mid-April release of her film “Erupcja,” which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival last year. She leads the film, which was filmed around Warsaw, alongside Charli XCX, with Jeremy O. Harris in a supporting role. 

The intimate film was brought to life by a skeleton cast and crew of seven people, five of whom were also acting. “ We were awake for three weeks creating this together,” Góra says of the collaborative nature of the film. They started filming with a premise but no script, and they collectively wrote the story as they filmed. 

“We were writing scenes each evening before,” she says. “Almost like a VR experience where you have an idea of your character and something happens to it, and then only at the end of the day you decide where that can lead them. It’s really cool, because it keeps you really awake and sensitive to your intuition and working together.”

“ This is the second film that I did in that exact same way,” says Góra, who previously cowrote and starred in “Roving Woman,” produced by Wim Wenders, which took a similar figure-it-out-as-we-go approach. Góra met “Erupcja” director Pete Ochs at the American Film Festival in Poland, where they discussed their similar approach to making movies. “ We realized that we do the same thing, and it would be great to make one together.”

The first person that Ochs brought onboard was Jeremy O. Harris, and while they were in New York they ran into Charli XCX. 

“I remember Pete texting me in the middle of the night at some point being like, ‘what do you think about Charli XCX?’ And I was like, wow, that’s crazy. She was just so down to join this crazy idea Pete and I had.”

Charli XCX and Góra star as old friends, who reconnect over an intense weekend in Warsaw. Throughout their friendship, a volcano erupts whenever they get together in person — a metaphor for the chaotic nature of their friendship. 

Although currently based in Warsaw, Góra’s life has been spread between Poland, where she was born, New York, and L.A., where she’s called home for the past 11 years. Recently, she’s been making a “slow move” to New York, and has been spending as much time in the city as possible when not on-set. 

For now, though, through mid-June most her time is on-set in Warsaw, where she’s filming the second season of Polish thriller “The Eastern Gate,” a “really crazy, intense, dark series” that has veered into the slasher genre. 

“My character is mainly killing in the season; there’s very little speaking, there’s a lot of very big choreographed murder scenes,” she says, adding that the role has presented a new physical challenge. 

“In order to pretend fight, you have to really do it,” she says, adding that she’s gone through months of stage combat training. “So it’s been really interesting to watch my body and how it changes.” 

Góra got her start in the entertainment industry as a fashion model, moving from Poland to London when she was 16, and stayed for college. 

“There were a lot of performative elements around fashion and around theater, which I was studying,” she says. “That always felt like something that I wanted to continue doing. And then I moved to New York at 19 to continue to do fashion.” From there, she moved to L.A., and then took a detour for a few years “buying muscle cars and driving around and taking pictures, and getting to know America and figuring out what it is that I really want to do,” she says. 

She landed on acting and filmmaking, which led to her creating the concept for her first feature “Roving Women,” an expansive road trip movie that takes her character from L.A. into the desert. 

“ I messaged Wim [Wenders] out of nowhere, because he’s the reason why I want to make films,” she says. “And said, ‘hey, I wanna make this film, and this is what I’m working on.’ And he just said, ‘let’s do it.’”

The film went on to premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival.

“That was a pivotal moment in my life,” she adds. “Forever I will be grateful to him. “