How does one kiss someone like they want to get slapped?
[Laughs] You know, I don’t know. What’s funny, I can’t remember it. Does she say that to me, or does she say that to Jared?
She says it to you. I think it’s to you.
I can’t remember.
And then you’re like, “I know how to do this,” and you bring in the other guy…
Another guy who’s a better kisser, apparently. I don’t know.
I was going, “Yeah, he’s going to bring in another guy…!”
[Laughs] Stephenie can write some hot scenes, man.
She can. She can, which is interesting because if you think about it, all of that’s subtext. Otherwise it’s really chaste. It’s an innocent kind of romance. You’ve only known each other for a couple of days. Is that kind of love pure fantasy for you? I’m not asking about your love life, I’m asking if it was easy to wrap your head around falling for someone that quickly.
I feel like there was a passage of time though. I feel like it was more than a couple of days before he really started to really fall for her. I know she had been in the cave quite a few days even before he said, “You can stay in my room…”
Yeah…!
That was the start of it, and then also it’s, I think, a sense of protection. When you feel like you need to protect something, that can invoke feelings of love. I think that’s when he felt for her, when he felt tremendous guilt. And I understand that. I have such a guilty conscience as it is, too. I completely understand. He feels so bad for his initial feelings for her, and, “Oh my god, I made a mistake. This enemy is actually better than we are.” Protecting her led to that sort of love for her.
Obviously Saoirse has to work with what Wanderer is actually doing, and what’s going on inside of her head. Was that articulated on set? When you acted opposite her, did you ever hear the voice-over?
Yeah, I never heard the voice-over. All of that is in her head. She had pre-recorded dialogue, and she wore an earpiece that would play it back to her. You’d have to ask her, but I believe that at some point she found it a bit distracting, and for some scenes she would just be like, “You know what? I’ll take it out. I’ll take my own pauses and do the scene in my head with myself.” Which, in that instance, as an actor I would try to find a way to organically occupy myself so I wouldn’t be looking at her talking to herself, like, “Uh, what the @#$% are you doing?” You know?
In soap operas, there was a joke on “Friends,” they call it “The Butt Sniff.”
[Laughs] The butt sniff?
Yeah. Just before the commercial, “I’m sorry, she’s in a coma,” and you can’t say anything to that even though you would. You’ve just got gotta pause for the commercial and go [sniff].
Yeah, I would do that off in the distance while she had the aside, then would come back to me. But yeah, I mean Saoirse had the hard job on this movie for sure.
Those were really cool sets, those caves.
Yeah!
Were those practical?
Yeah!
All of them, really?
They built those inside a sound stage, man. Everything was there except for the mirrors on the ceiling. But the scale of it was so grand. I walked in for the first time and my mouth dropped, and it was like 75% built at that time. I was able to go into my room, and I had that little balcony. You look across that expanse and I can see Jard standing outside of his room, and then over a little bit there’s Jeb on the platform where his desk is, he’s in his chair. There was some things, like the waterfall and the bath, that was in a different location so we kind of cheated those hallways, and the wheat field was a cheat too, in that main cavern, but the size of it was so grand. It really helped us.
It contributed a lot to me. This felt almost like a sci-fi film from the 1970s in a lot of ways in terms of the aesthetic.
Thank you. And the burn, the slow burn of it. I grew up with Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which is a sci-fi film without explosions, without lasers, without blowing up the world or the White House, which is a human tale of someone dealing with this completely extraordinary event. This felt like that, in a way, where the set-up lets you sit into it. There’s scenes that just breathe and hold, and I thought that the producers were very brave in allowing Andrew to do that, because obviously that’s all him. And also, what’s interesting too, is not reverting to those easy sci-fi elements of lasers and explosions. We finally get to see the invasion from the aliens’ standpoint, where you start to maybe go, “Oh, maybe they’re right.” Because they give us [a] reason. They’re here because, “They’re not suited to this. They don’t deserve this, and we’re going to make them better.” Normally you only get the human side. “We have to fight these aliens and get them off [the planet]!”
It’s kind of rude.
It’s sort of strange.
Has there been any talk of you returning to “Supernatural” at all? I always wondered what the hell happened to you.
I know, Adam’s still in Hell for some reason.
Right? It’s kind of @#$%ed up?
It’s pissing me off, because I really @#$%ing like that show.
It’s a great show!
I miss it, man. Working with those boys and that whole crew up there, it was so much fun. They’re such a family. I talked to these two writers this one time at an audition, and they said, “We wrote a Natural Born Killers-style episode for you to be in,” and I was like, “When?!” And they were like, “No, they killed it.” I was like, “What?! That sounds amazing!” I don’t know what that means, but a Natural Born Killers episode of “Supernatural?”
Maybe it was a spec where you broke out of Hell and went on a killing spree or something.
Yeah, yeah. They kind of got traction, and then they didn’t go with it.
That would be really cool.
I know! Tell me about it.
That’s too bad. But you’d be up for it, if they asked you to come back for a series finale or something?
Oh, yeah! Absolutely, man. It’s so much fun. I had such a blast on that show. I miss those guys. There’s being around them and not being around them. They’re good dudes.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel, co-host of The B-Movies Podcast, co-star of The Trailer Hitch, and the writer of The Test of Time. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
