Aubrey Plaza was “completely destroyed” emotionally at the end of filming ‘Black Bear’.

The 36-year-old star plays actress Allison in the thriller – which explores filmmaking, gaslighting and feminism – and though she didn’t realise how tough she was finding the shoot at the time, she’d noticed at the end of a day’s filming how “tense” she was, and once shooting wrapped for good, she needed time to recover.

She told Empire magazine: “I knew I’d really have to dive off the deep end and surrender to the process.

“So I wasn’t paying attention to how it was affecting me. But I had moments back in my hotel room at the end of a 16-hour day and my muscles would be twitching.

“And then I’d think, ‘I’ve put my body through hell.’ Physically and emotionally, I was a mess at the end of it…

“At the end of the shoot I was completely destroyed. It took me a while to shake it off.”

But Plaza felt she “needed” such a gruelling experience.

She said: “It’s not maybe the healthiest thing. At that time in my life, I needed to go through that. To work out some things. It felt very cathartic for me.”

The movie is deliberately ambiguous as to what is real and what is part of a film within the film, and Aubrey admitted the confusion translated to the on-set experience.

She added: “We were shooting in a very isolated location and the production was pretty challenging and chaotic. I think that energy really infused into the film.

“The actors became the crew and the crew became the actors. Everything was flip-flopping.”