Toby Kebbell and Jason Mitchell Talk Kong: Skull Island
Staci Layne Wilson
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Set in the 1970s, Kong: Skull Island follows a team of explorers and soldiers who travel to an uncharted island in the Pacific, unaware that they are crossing into the domain of monsters, including the mythic Kong. Toby Kebbell and Jason Mitchell play soldiers sent to find, and fight, King Kong.
Dread Central: What it was like acting in a monster movie with this kind of legacy?
Jason Mitchell: You’re like, they have a couple of things at the top of the film world and this is definitely the number one top thing, you can’t top Kong, it’s the best, all the way back to what? The Sixties, the Thirties? I don’t know but every movie ever made was just dope to see, you just fall into it, so it was easy for me when they sent me the email. It’s like. “Please make me a part of it; what do I have to do?”
DC: What about working with CGI?
Toby Kebbell: Well, there was a fair percentage of it that was practical effects so we got to learn to fly helicopters. Now when you see that footage you think, “Oh, it’s just a bunch of CGI helicopters flying into a cloud,” but we flew those helicopters, they trained us to fly. Now here’s the thing: passing your license is hard because your classroom work is incredibly intense but the mechanical yes, it’s more difficult than flying a plane for example, you’re gliding to an extent, in a helicopter you’re using two pedals for a pitch up and what they call a stir, so they trained us to do it, to come in and hover, it was pretty crazy.
JM: I just thought it was a flight thing, you know, like they wanted us to be able to jump up in a helicopter and make everything look real so we get in the air and he says, “Yeah, you see those mountains? Take me to them.” Me? This is where I go, “Okay, I’m ready for this.”
TK: You don’t look out the windshield, you look at the dials, this is the information. You’re not looking out the windshield flying around, all your information is here so you’re told, even in the old Hueys, you’re told… “All these gauges explain.” We had a Scotsman, he was teaching us, from the Royal Air Force.
DC: How long did it take to learn to fly?
TK: They gave us a week to learn to hover. It’s like juggling, you drop in and you’re coming towards yourself and you go away from yourself and then somehow, on Friday you’ve given up, you think I’m never going to do this, I’m going to kill this poor guy who has already had a career in the military, now he’s teaching a fool like me and I’m just sitting there and then you bring this thing in to hover and somehow you’re hovering, it’s a muscle memory. You’re constantly stirring the pot, the Scotsman was talking about porridge, to keep stirring.
JM: It’s so crazy how much finesse you have to have… we did this exercise where they put a pencil… because it’s such a huge piece of machinery, you want to grab it and be strong with it, but it does everything you tell it to do so really. You should be able to handle it like this, you know what I mean, and they’re like, if you break this pencil, you’re going a little too hard. It was pretty intense.
DC: And was there military training?
JM: There was some weapons work, teaching us how to move as a group, you know the whole stop, the booby trap things, it was cool though because for guys that’s what we love.
DC: Did you have the opportunity to rehearse together before the shooting started?
TK: We did a workshop before shooting, we did about a week, we’d go in every day, improving, working on our characters, talk about where we were from, doing little workshops, getting paired and then grouped into fours. It was good, it was really a phenomenal experience, it was nice to have that and then got crowned with Sam and John, John Oritz in fact was one of my favorite people. He’s such a good performer, there’s a scene where he’s nervous, where he’s presenting to the whole group… he played it nervous. When he came up and started, I got nervous for him, like why am I so nervous? He did so well, was so involved in his performance, just watching it there, you know.
DC: Toby, we heard about you doing Kong’s expressions for the mo-cap…
TK: I filled in a few gaps, yeah. ILM created a digital character, it was great to be asked by ILM to do that. I’m not blocked contractually but on the other end of this microphone someone from Warner Brothers is listening. “I assisted in some digital performances.” [laughs]
DC: What it’s like meeting Samuel L. Jackson and John Goodman?
JM: You know, it’s so crazy, John Goodman has such a good way of breaking the ice, he’s so good at being himself. You know a lot of people aren’t really good at that and he knows he’s a legend, he knows that he’s one of the greatest. I think when I met him it was more of him just letting me know it was all right, you don’t have to address any of the things that are going on in your mind, it’s cool, it’ll be fine. Sam, on the other hand, he’s got jokes for days, Sam is going to fuck with you as long as he knows you, he’s my guy, but watching both of them, like some of the locations you couldn’t leave, you had to stay there, like when we did some of the stuff on the rivers, there was nowhere to go so when they were doing their scenes, you got to watch them, you got to be in video village and really watch them. Like when Sam did the monologue about “man is king,” I’m just watching him saying, “I know why they pay you what they pay you.” You don’t have to ask him any acting questions, they display it.
TK: That’s the other wonderful thing about Sam, you think because you’ve seen his movies, yeah he does this, but it’s not him. You know, when you get to spend time with him, we got to spend some time together, we had some intimate scenes, I don’t know if they ended up in the picture, I was blown away. One of my favorite films is Fresh, Boaz Yakin directed it, in fact it’s the reason I did Prince of Persia, I know it’s up here with some of the worst films in the world, but hear me out: Boaz Yakin wrote Prince of Persia, so when I first read it, Garsiv was an incredible role, it just changed somewhere along the line, these things happen, so when I spoke to him, I was talking to him about Fresh, I was like that was incredible. He’s a very giving human being so yeah, meeting your heroes got abolished when I met him. He’s incredibly bright and very literate. He has a vast knowledge so when you’re speaking to him, his references, they’re obscure, some of his references are incredibly obscure, it takes some knowledge to catch them.
DC: Did you learn any acting tips from him?
TK: Not really acting lessons but life lessons, you know? Just a way to live your life, especially on my trajectory because I didn’t really plan on fame, I never really factored that in to my life. He’s somebody who just coasts through it so what I like, I tell him all the time, I’m just working on my Sam walk, if I’m as cool as Sam Jackson at the end of my life, then I’ll be all right. He has a real way of leveling the business with the art, it’s dope. To have someone like that in your life you can call up, it’s dope.
DC: All that shooting in the jungle… was it was brutal?
TK: There was a memo about this thick about the water. They were like, “Don’t go in the water, don’t drink the water, don’t do this with the water.” Then, “All right, action, now wash your face with the water, now run through the water so fast it covers your face, now duck behind that rock in the water.”
JM: Yeah, as soon as you come out of the water, someone yells, “Bleach him down, rinse his mouth out.” So crazy.
DC: Did anyone get sick?
JM: Everyone got sick. Actually, so crazy, I get a mean case of the badooms, we were in Ho Long Bay, it’s maybe a thirty-minute boat ride and then you get there and base camp is a boat, two boats strapped together, and everything is doing this, my stomach is doing that, it’s the most beautiful place in the world but I don’t know how I feel right now because my face is about to turn green, but I just saw a school of jellyfish and some random monkeys, this is like the dopest, weirdest situation. A couple of times they yelled cut and I was like, let me run to the bathroom but it was dope, man.
DC: Do you prefer being on set versus on location after this experience?
TK: I mean, we were on set in Australia and there was a whole panic about a black widow.
JM: Oh yeah, and I’m afraid of spiders, too, which was something Jordan kind of… because at first they had an idea of me being eaten by a Venus flytrap, not eaten but trying to be eaten and we had to work our way out of it, but the spider thing was crazy. They came to me and said, so how do you feel about spiders, the same as everyone else, so it’s not going to be one of those things where I’ve got all these spiders crawling over my legs, right? They said nah, we’ve got an idea for you.
DC: Did you look through the script to see how you die?
TK: I died eleven different ways yeah, it was eleven different ways and in the end Jordan did a sweet thing, he said why don’t you just slowly turn and I’ll decide how to kill you, I was like sweet, that works for me. Don’t make me shoot eleven different death scenes.
DC: How hard was it working alone with pretend creatures?
TK: It was nice but as Jason just said, we were all together so we’d be brought out to certain locations, in fact only when I see Kong fight the squid is really the only time I was truly by myself, the full day just me. Generally I come out with the guys, I get ready in the morning, I see everybody, they’ll do their scene, I’ll do my mine because it’s a similar location so the bit where I die, I got to see them all melancholy about however I die, and I was like man, that’s touching, it’s like setting up a fake funeral. Yeah, it was bizarre but I really wasn’t by myself.
DC: What are the craziest scenes you had to shoot?
TK: I had a fun moment where, in the end, the assistance I gave to the digital ape created was I ate a bunch of Twizzlers, for Kong to eat this squid, we just bunched up a bunch of Twizzlers and just bit them off. That was good, that was a good day, I got fat but…
JM: I’ve got to honestly say the water days we’re just really weird for me. We went to some of the sketchiest places, you know what I mean?
TK: Wonderful, wonderful fun and exciting sketchy places.
JM: They had a day where I was just standing there, you know in a random army stance, legs fairly enough apart, and I hear this boop, boop, boop and I’m like what just happened, and I look and they’ve got an eel just swimming past me like this and I’m like, this is the shit I’m talking about, I’ve got to get out of here. It was really to the point where Jordan was like I’m not dealing with everybody around here who’s scared, I’m just going to get in the water with you guys and direct from here and show you that it’s not that bad and I’m like I hear you, I’m still scared but I hear you. Yeah, Vietnam, it was interesting. It was interesting to see like how many people cared that we were doing something so great for their country. You know they all have that jailhouse pose that they do, that’s just how they just chill. There would be fifty or sixty people in a tree, just bending down, watching us, just really rooting us on the whole time. It was very bizarre but very, very empowering at the same time, for these people to have these bomb scars around their place and still be like, oh my god, we’re so happy to see you guys, it was crazy.
DC: So, in the sequel, with Kong and Godzilla meeting and fighting… who do you think will win?
TK: Kong is a hundred feet tall, Godzilla is three hundred feet, but I’ve played an ape before, he’s going to tear up that lizard. You know, watch him with snakes, Godzilla’s in trouble and he’s young, so just wait.
Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ Kong: Skull Island reimagines the origin of the mythic Kong in a compelling, original adventure from director Jordan Vogt-Roberts.
Kong: Skull Island stars Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson, Brie Larson, John Goodman, and John C. Reilly. The international ensemble cast also includes Tian Jing, Corey Hawkins, Jason Mitchell, John Ortiz, Thomas Mann, Shea Whigham, Toby Kebbell, and Eugene Cordero.
Vogt-Roberts directs the film from a screenplay by Max Borenstein, John Gatins, Dan Gilroy, and Derek Connolly. To fully immerse audiences in the mysterious Skull Island, the director, cast, and filmmaking team filmed across three continents over six months, capturing its primordial landscapes on Oahu, Hawaii; on Australia’s Gold Coast; and finally in Vietnam, where filming took place across multiple locations, some of which have never before been seen on film.
Kong: Skull Island will be released worldwide in 2D, 3D in select theaters, and IMAX beginning March 10, 2017, from Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company.
Synopsis:
A diverse team of scientists, soldiers, and adventurers unite to explore a mythical, uncharted island in the Pacific, as dangerous as it is beautiful. Cut off from everything they know, the team ventures into the domain of the mighty Kong, igniting the ultimate battle between man and nature. As their mission of discovery becomes one of survival, they must fight to escape a primal Eden in which humanity does not belong.
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