After an extremist militant group threatens their lives, Prey sees a young couple (Ryan Phillippe and Mena Suvari) forced to flee their Christian missionary post in the Kalahari Desert. After being granted passage aboard a rickety plane, piloted by a corrupt smuggler (Emile Hirsch), their escape to safety is nearly in reach.
However, when their aircraft loses power and crash lands, they discover a bigger threat awaits them as they find themselves stranded in the middle of an animal preserve populated by maneaters: lions, leopards, and hyenas. Injured, frightened, and being tracked by the extremists, this ragtag group of passengers must fight for survival from both man and beast where only the strong will survive.
A few days ago, we spoke with Hirsch - best known for his work in Into the Wild, Lone Survivor, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood - about his standout role as Prey's antagonist, Grun, a character who is far from a typical "bad guy."
Throughout our conversation, the actor took us through his approach to the role and the unique challenges he faced working on a gimbal for a thrilling plane crash sequence. Hirsch also addresses using his imagination to battle lions, explains what drew him to the movie, and his work with Phillippe to build the tension between Grun and Andrew.
We also hear from him on Wolverine fan casts and how Speed Racer has been embraced in recent years after opening to negative reviews in 2008. That's a role Hirsch is clearly proud of and hearing from him on its legacy is fascinating.
Check out the full interview, along with our on-camera chat with Phillippe, below.
This isn’t a traditional bad guy role. He’s got questionable morals but develops a lot as this story continues; what was it like to get into the mindset of a character like this?
It was challenging because for two-thirds of the movie, he’s a very difficult, irredeemable guy in a lot of ways. He causes a lot of chaos and destruction and has a bad attitude as well. He just appears very selfish and standoffish. It was a challenge to find a character that was believable to be like that and then find ways where it could be believable that he could be capable of changing. The idea of, ‘What does it take to make a bad person into a good person?’ What are the steps that someone has to go through or undertaker in order to get there?
This is a lower-budged film but it’s still very ambitious. What was it like shooting that awesome plane crash sequence as the "pilot," so to speak?
Shooting on a gimbal…we shot on those on Speed Racer, so I had a fair amount of gimbal experience. It’s basically like a massive robotic platform that they put this place shell casing where everyone could sit inside, but it’s strapped to this arm and can shift around to create the illusion of turbulence. Honestly, it’s pretty gnarly when you’re in it. You very quickly come to the understanding that the gimbal is capable of exerting G-Forces on you that could very easily break your neck if it was turned high enough. You sense the power. You’re like, ‘Oh wow, if this thing isn’t perfectly calibrated, it has the potential to really hurt me.’ There’s a little bit of nerves involved in that aspect, but the people who operate it have a lot of safety [precuations]. You still respect the gimbal! You never take that kind of machine for granted and it wasn’t hard to get into the mindset of being in that aircraft crash mindset when you’re being violently chucked around!
The lion attack scenes are great and really up the tension. What were those days like on set and what was the biggest challenge in using your imagination during those moments?
The biggest challenge probably was using your imagination for those sequences! You have to try to make it believable that there are these huge predators in desire to have lunch and you’re on the menu. It was getting the hesitation that comes with being prey. They don’t look at the lions as if they’re evil; they look at the lions as if they’re lions that want food and sense these people are weak and injured and easy pickings.
What attracts you to a project like this? It’s an edge-of-your-seat experience as an audience member, but what about it jumped out at you?
I had worked with this writer and director before on The Immaculate Room. He used to be a monk for eight years in India and is a super zen, really creative, cool, elegant guy. I really had an enjoyable experience working with him before so he sent me this script and it was totally different. It really showed his versatility as a writer and it was a little more action-y and genre-y than The Immaculate Room which took place in one room with me and Kate Bosworth. I thought it would be fun to work with him again and get to explore a very different character than the one we’d worked on together before.
When I spoke to Ryan [Phillippe], he mentioned you didn’t have a tonne of time for rehearsals and to get together before shooting started but said it was between scenes you’d work on the dynamic between your characters. What was that like for you?
I’ve always got along really well with Ryan. I’ve known him for so long, both of us coming up in Los Angeles. We got along great and had a really easy rapport. He has so much experience and has worked with so many amazing people, he knows everybody and has a huge well of experience to draw from. He’s been in so many different places shooting and just knows what he’s doing. It was fun and I felt there were times when he was really experiencing the despair of the character and it was hard for him emotionally. It was really challenging because you’re playing a role where you’ve lost the thing that matters to you most. Not only that, but it’s also tied to the themes of faith in the movie where so much of his identity is based on being a Christian missionary and his love of God, only for his faith to get shattered. It’s not just losing someone he loves, but everything he believes about the universe. He’s at risk of losing everything and it was interesting because I could see it eating away at Ryan in a really interesting way. I feel like there were times when I would try to keep the morale up and keep the mood up just because…you don’t want to get consumed with that kind of feeling. That’s what Brun is trying to do in the movie. I’m trying to pull him out of that pit. He had a really challenging role.
Grun is a fascinating character and, as I said, he’s quite self-serving at first and there are those great scenes where he antagonises the other survivors. He does change a lot, though, and that journey must have been really satisfying for you?
Yeah, that was part of the challenge. I had to give him an arc where it’s believable that he makes these shifts and a lot of the ability to give him those shifts are connected to him losing his wife. He lost her in an accident that he was responsible for drinking and driving, so a lot of his negativity is a result of closing all the doors and protecting himself from feeling the despair that he’s in. He can only have those walls up for so long before they come down. When he’s put in this extreme situation, he gets to that place and is able to process his own sense of regret and owing a debt, in a way.
I see your name come up a lot with fans suggesting you could play Wolverine. Has a superhero role ever come your way and are you even interested in the genre?
I always looked at Speed Racer like it was a superhero. I watched the cartoon so much as a kid, I just viewed it like that. I had a lot of fun playing Speed and that movie has aged really, really well. It really does hold up. I don’t know, I mean, Wolverine? That’s definitely…I used to watch X-Men: The Animated Series as a kid and that was amazing. I loved watching that show. I don’t know. It would be awesome, though, sure.
Speed Racer didn’t get the best response when it was released, but like the Star Wars prequels, it seems to have found a devoted fanbase from the kids who watched it at the time. How do you feel about the movie’s legacy and would you ever reprise the role?
I’m so pleasantly surprised. When it initially came out, it didn’t really do very well. It didn’t even get good reviews. It was panned and you could almost say ridiculed. To have the public perception and affection for the movie grow so much over the years is kind of cool. At the time, that did not seem like it would ever happen based on the initial release of the movie. I was like, ‘Oh man, they’re never going to come around to this thing even though we all loved making the movie.’ Myself, the actors, and the Wachowskis loved the movie. It’s kind of crazy that it’s come around as much as it has to the point where it’s almost hard to believe. In certain forums, it’s really, really well regarded now as the ultimate manga adaptation. It’s cool. The esteem the film is held in now has exceeded my wildest dreams in a way. The idea that we would make a movie as many years ago as we made it and it would still be talked about to this day…I definitely did not imagine that happening, especially when you think about how many of those big budget tentpole movies come out every year. You really don’t talk about many of them more than a couple of years later. They just don’t have the unique thing that makes them classics.
This is a very different type of action movie compared to something like Speed Racer as it’s very grounded and gritty. What do you enjoy, in contrast, about working on a harder-hitting project like Prey?
This was a tough, hard survival movie and that’s sort of satisfying, to put yourself through those paces. It was a very difficult shoot for all the actors and that crew. We shot the film in Valencia which is right by Six Flags. We didn’t even shoot it in Africa and we shot the film in the winter! We’re shooting in a location where it’s supposed to be really hot, but it’s actually really cold. We’re wearing clothes that would imply where the weather is very, very hot. The way the shoot was scheduled was perhaps a little bit questionable as we would constantly be freezing! It would already be challenging due to the outdoor nature of the shoot as every scene is outside and we’re in the middle of nowhere. They found desert in the middle of nowhere, but you add in the cold and that really put it over the top. Even then, when you’re in these really cold environments or doing really physical stuff like the fighting, there’s something satisfying about finishing a day like that where you work for 12 hours and you’re exhausted. There’s a certain satisfaction there.
Prey is now playing in theaters and available on demand.