Watch Charlotte Rampling get high with a bunch of teens in humorous Juniper clip

If you're holding, don't hold out on Charlotte Rampling.

In an exclusive clip from Juniper, which EW is debuting above, the Oscar nominee expertly gets high with a bunch of teens.

The moment shows Rampling's character, Ruth, at a party with her grandson and his friends. A nearby group is passing a joint between them. Noticing Ruth, one of them says to her, "Hello, love," to which she responds, "Hello, handsome." It's this kid who encourages his friend to pass her the joint, but the friend is unsure.

"It isn't polite to Bogart a joint," Ruth interjects. Much to the group's surprise, she then takes a deep hit, smiling knowingly as she does so.

The Oscar-nominated actress tells EW that she loved the intergenerational nature of the scene. "When we were smoking pot [years ago], I didn't really like pot very much actually, but I mean I sort of went along with it because that was the thing that people were doing," she says. "For an older woman now to be smoking it, and younger people seeing the older woman smoking it, and actually enjoying it and saying, 'It wasn't as good as in my time' — that sort of thing could never have happened in my time in that way, so that scene was really, really fun to play."

Per the synopsis of the film (now in theaters), self-destructive teenager Sam (George Ferrier) returns home from boarding school to find that his alcoholic grandmother (Rampling) has moved in after breaking her leg. Although the two initially clash, they develop an unexpected bond. Juniper has been described as a story of loss and acceptance, set against the scenic backdrop of New Zealand.

For the veteran star, the part of Ruth exemplified exactly what she's always looked for in roles. "I've looked for something that connects me with the role sort of in quite a deep way, and then I like to explore the different possibilities around that connection," she says. "It has to be something that I feel is a truth within me, because I always used to think that I didn't really want to be 'an actor,' but I wanted to represent human beings, and that to me had to have something truthful about it. And I was quite keen on that, and I'm still very much in that same register."

The film is deeply personal for writer and director Matthew Saville, who based the story on his own experiences when his alcoholic grandmother moved into his family's home when he was 17. Rampling says it was a pleasure working with Saville, who she says she "really did come to love very much because he's a great guy" — but it was working with newcomer Ferrier that was especially rewarding.

"I think when one knows one's own profession quite well, has great experience, I think it's a great treat to work with younger people — not to teach them anything, but so they can just watch you," she says, citing her own experience watching Dirk Bogarde working on The Night Porter when she was 22 as an example. "[Bogarde] said, 'I'm not going to tell you anything, just watch me.' So I didn't exactly say that to George, to 'Sam,' but it was sort of that. Because if you really watch someone working as an actor, you really start to understand how it happens, because it's very, very subtle."

For her, though, the experience was both a unique challenge and a bit of a catharsis. "It challenged the parts of me that I probably would be a little bit scared to express in the way that Ruth expressed them — in her rage, in her radicality about certain ways of being, and in her crisis modes, I suppose," Rampling admits. "I don't think I would've dared go that far, or I don't dare go that far perhaps myself, because I don't quite know where that will take me. I don't really like going there. But it was really, in a way, great to express it. Because all those things that you don't express, when you can express them through theatrical ways and through creative ways, it really does you a lot of good."

Juniper played at the Palm Springs International Film Festival, as well as fests in Tallinn, Edinburgh, Munich, and Brisbane. In addition to Rampling and Ferrier, actors Edith Poor and Marton Csokas co-star.

The film was produced by Desray Armstrong and Angela Littlejohn in association with the New Zealand Film Commission and Celsius Entertainment. Andrew Mackie, Richard Payton, Mark Chamberlain, Thierry Wase-Bailey, and Henriette Wollmann are executive producers.

Juniper is in theaters now, and will launch on Amazon and Apple TV April 4.

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