Interview: The Rampage Team Goes on a Path of Destruction
Staci Layne Wilson
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As if Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson isn’t enough in terms of megawatt manliness, the new monster movie Rampage also features Joe Manganiello (“True Blood”) and Jeffrey Dean Morgan (“The Walking Dead”). The muscle doesn’t stop there, though — Malin Ackerman (The Final Girls) and Naomie Harris (28 Days Later) play strong, essential characters who also fight giant, mutated apex predators.
Rampage is based on the simple videogame of the same name. So, a lot of backstory was created for the movie. What triggers the berserk animal outburst is a secret biogenetic experiment that goes terribly wrong. A gene-altering substance is unleased, causing infected beasts—specifically an ape, a wolf, and a crocodile—to grow in strength, size, and aggression.
Harris plays Kate, who, as an idealistic young scientist, was recruited by a bioengineering company called Energyne. At the time, she did not know that her employer, Claire (Ackerman), was secretly diverting her groundbreaking work into weaponizing DNA. Now the results have come to frightening fruition, and the scientist is horrified at how her design has been perverted. Kate is convinced there must be a way to neutralize the creatures with a biological “off” switch… she might find it, if she can reach her lab in time. Of course, Claire is guarding the gate.
Ackerman says, “Claire is smart and manipulative, such a wonderful character to play. She has her eye on the money and is really a bit insane. When the creatures start to destroy the city, she couldn’t care less. Project Rampage is her baby and its success is what she lives for.”
Morgan plays Agent Russell, who, he says, is “so deep and well-connected and powerful that no one has officially heard of him. Yet, Russell is the ultimate fixer. He’s the genuine article—an undercover badass.”
Manganiello plays a mercenary hitman who’s never had to take out targets quite like these. At their peak growth, the wolf is 50 feet high, 85 feet long, and weighs over 13 tons. The croc clocks in at 60.7 x 225 feet, weighs a whopping 150 tons, and has jaws that can snap skyscrapers like sandcastles. The ape is as big as a house. “I’m usually an animal lover, but my character is totally not!” Manganiello laughs. “When I was on True Blood, they used to bring in giant live wolves for most of my scenes, and so I’m no stranger to working with wolves. Unfortunately, on this film it went the other way! The wolves weren’t listening to me and doing what I said this time!”
As the animals absorb volatile DNA mined from other species, they start to mutate. The first casualty of the flawed formula is George, a gentle albino silverback gorilla housed at a wildlife sanctuary and zoo. George is very special to Davis (Johnson), the primatologist who rescued him from poachers as a baby. When George turns overnight from an affable ape to a killer colossus, Davis is determined to do whatever it takes to keep George safe while also trying to figure out what happened. But he’s also determined to protect the population from the angry ape—and his new friends: a mammoth flying wolf and a building-crunching crocodile—it’s quite the moral dilemma.
Harris says, “There were lots of ‘wow’ moments and so many sets that blew my mind. I’d never been in a helicopter or a plane that’s been recreated with hydraulic effects to tilt, so I’m hanging from a wire and flying around. At the center of everything, Brad [Peyton, director] and Dwayne – and the whole production team – they want to make you feel that it’s all happening right here, right now, and that you’re really in the center of the action. That’s what the audience will see.”
Ackerman jokes about how easy it was to do her stunts. “The throwing in the air was simple, I mean that’s something you do every day, right? Evil was also really easy too! It’s crazy how simple. It was so juicy. It’s so much fun to play something, you know, to be the villain, to be the mastermind, to be that intelligent to conjure all this up. I really loved it! It’s always fun to go the other way. Being thrown into the mouth of the gorilla was also one of those things where, as I became an audience member when I got to see it finally done, I yelled out loud and thought it was the best scene ever! Even though I was in it, I didn’t know what to expect because [when we were filming] I was being hoisted up on wires as I was going up into the air. Then it was a completely separate day when I was being dropped into the mouth of the gorilla, and it was just a bunch of mattresses that I had to be put down into. The stunt lady was telling me to touch my toes as I went down, and I realized how not in shape I was. I should have gone to the gym with Dwayne. But it was so much fun to then see it all come together and how brilliantly it was done.”
Harris adds that even though she’s been in the high-octane action world of the James Bond franchise, she wasn’t quite prepared for Rampage. “I actually went into it thinking it was going to be the same sort of deal [as Bond] and it was completely different because one doesn’t really have green screen. We’re out in the real world doing stunts and doing them for real. This was reacting to tennis balls. So you have a tennis ball over here – and they were numbered one to seven and they’d say, ‘Look at three, the building has collapsed. Look at five, and the wolf is flying across at you.’ I was completely out of my mind because I was absolutely terrified, because this was something completely new to me. I had to really lean on Dwayne and he was amazing. He’s the master of this, this is his world, not mine at all. I felt completely lost in the beginning, but then the way to get through it is just pretend you’re a kid and just to play and have fun, so that’s what I did.”
Morgan says, “It’s a dream come true, doing a movie like this with Brad and DJ. When someone calls and says, ‘Hey, would you like to do a movie with Dwayne? It’s got monsters in it!’ It’s sort of like what you dream about as a little kid, even though I’m way older than he is! And Brad, he’s so on top of it – there is a lot of green screen and ‘look at the tennis ball’ but we could also see he was so meticulous in his prep. He had scenes done on an iPad that we could see – which, thank god – because when you talk about monsters and buildings, it really helped a lot.”
Morgan also talks about the early development of his character, who’s a secret agent but also a cowboy. “Brad had this idea of what Russell was going to be. At first your introduction to him, him walking down the ramp of the huge cargo plane, it was cool. Brad was like, ‘I’m going to start with cowboy boots and we’re gonna come up, and it’s a big-ass belt buckle.’ It was a whole kind of visual thing and at first I thought, ‘This is a lot,’ and we talked and it was, ‘Oh man, this might be too much.’ Then we started picking out belt buckles and guns. He really talked me into it because I was [worried about overplaying it] and by the end I was like, ‘How big can I go!?’
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