Watch Phoebe Dynevor commit a real-life theft for new espionage thriller shot on iPhone (exclusive)

Phoebe Dynevor would never steal from you, but she could if she wanted to. She’d likely get away with it, too.

Directed by Neil Burger, espionage thriller Inheritance (out Jan. 24) stars Dynevor as Maya, who tries to get reacquainted with her estranged father (Rhys Ifans) and ends up neck-deep in an international conspiracy. To save her dad, she must travel across the world to retrieve top-secret intel and then fight to stay ahead of the intelligence networks and criminal organizations that want it for themselves. In one scene, Maya swipes a pair of sunglasses — something the actress actually did herself, walking out of the store with the merchandise without being detected.

Dynevor’s impressive mini-heist needed to be real because Inheritance was shot guerrilla-style on an iPhone. A small, roughly 10-person crew traveled around the world to make the film, often shooting on the street without major setups as regular people walked by. With a phone camera trained on her face, the actress had to nab the shades and walk out of the store without a single employee seeing her. “I remember feeling really nervous and afraid that they would think I was actually stealing, but at the time, we wanted real reactions from the staff. It was very scary,” the actress tells Entertainment Weekly.

Maya is killing time in the airport on her way to Cairo when she walks into the shop to grab some shades for her travels. “It’s not even that she can’t help herself. She can help herself, so she helps herself to the sunglasses,” Burger explains.

Watch her pull it off in an exclusive clip from the film below:

To make the international thriller without a large crew, each beat had to be tightly scripted. Burger instructed Dynevor on how to walk in and walk out with the new frames.

“We had all sorts of contingency plans, excuses, and explanations for what we were going to do,” the director explains. Once the location and the loot were chosen, the team went to the same store’s Fifth Avenue location to buy the exact pair of sunglasses so they’d have a receipt in case Dynevor got caught. Luckily, she pulled off the low-key heist without incident. (And don't worry: the sunglasses were returned after the scene was shot.)

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For Dynevor, performing in front of the small camera not only calmed her fears but also gave her something to focus on. “There was a safety net that came with the camera being there because it felt like this isn’t real. We’re shooting something,” she says. “We only had one take to get it right. I’d have to be very cognizant of whether the camera was getting it. You don’t want to have to do that twice.”

Getting used to the bare-bones shoot took time, but the nerve-racking encounters started on day one. One of her first scenes involved drinking tequila and smoking cigarettes on the streets of New York City. The alcohol wasn’t real, but the impact it had on people around her certainly was. At one point, a mother pulled her two children away from her. “It was an experience I’ve never had before, and this mother pulled them away understandably," she recalls.

When the police eventually approached her because of her drunken behavior, Dynevor decided not to break character. “It was just very, very strange knowing that it wasn’t real, but our director wanted it to feel as real as possible, so sometimes we would keep going and see what we could get out of the exchange with people on the street,” she shares. It was only when the threat of an actual arrest became imminent that she used her preferred tactic to disarm people: her British accent. “I would then come out of [Maya’s] accent and turn on my poshest British actor and be like, ‘I’m an actor.’”

It was vital to have Maya serve as a barrier between the actress and the real world during the grueling shoot. The filming style required Dynevor to get ready at her hotel and then be in character throughout the day. “I stayed in character, in the costume, to stay on these long-haul flights we were actually filming on. Stay in the character’s makeup, hair, and costumes the whole time. I really had to shed her when we weren’t filming because I was playing her so long,” she explains. Having that distance made shooting dangerous chase scenes in foreign countries less daunting.

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As for her unintended co-stars, the real people who ended up on camera due to the team's shooting style, the filmmakers combined practical and digital tricks to avoid legal hurdles. The team would set up signs to let pedestrians know when they were in a shooting zone, and when necessary, they digitally added masks to obscure faces, a necessary tactic when children entered the frame.

Inheritance premieres on Jan. 24.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly