Trivia

Directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen visualized Jack Quaid as the perfect lead for this movie. After watching his performance on the subversive superhero series The Boys (2019), Berk and Olsen saw an energy in his everyman comedic performances that inspired them to dub him his generation's Tom Hanks. Yet to perfect this role took an unconventional skill set. "Jack had to rewire his brain so that he could get punched and not flinch," Olsen says. "Your whole life as an actor, you're told to sell the hit, and when you get punched, you flinch, you wince, you sell the pain. He had to work with our stunt coordinator, Stanimir Stamatov, to untrain himself from that."

The film was shot more in sequence than usual. Jack Quaid explained, "That was also just for a practical reason, a lot of the injuries you see on me are done practically. We had an amazing team led by Clinton Smith, our special effects supervisor. He's the guy; he had to basically take a 3D scan of me, and they printed it out. It's this green bald bust of me that's hairless. It was just this very uncanny image of me. But that's so they could, when I wasn't there, apply all the different wounds to that bust and make sure they worked with the dimensions of my face. Then so many makeup tests for not only the wounds but the tattoos that I have. I just became a canvas, essentially. But I loved every second of it, and it looks really good in the movie. I loved that most of it is practical; that's the stuff that I love."

Despite Nate's ability to not feel pain, directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen were meticulous in working to make sure the internal logic of the film stayed grounded, no matter how heightened the situations became. "He's not a superhero, and we were going to take liberties with how far the human body can be pushed," Berk says. "Every action movie does, but we wanted to stay within a semi-believable realm within the rule system of our movie. So what we did with our stunt team was we went through and audited every single hit in the movie, and we transferred a lot of those head hits down into body hits. We didn't want his face to be mashed potatoes by the midpoint of the movie."

Jack Quaid says he was amazed by Ray Nicholson's ability to be his "very sweet" self and then "turn his psycho on at the drop of a hat," adding that his co-star has as an electrifying side that's "almost like human Red Bull."

When it came to stunts and action choreography for selling the impact of every punch thrown, Jack Quaid explained, "actually it was scary at first, to be honest. Because it's something they drill into you. As soon as I was doing The Hunger Games (2012), my first major movie, I remember doing stunts for that. They really try to say, 'Hey, sell the pain,' because that's what also makes the audience believe that a hit is real when it's fake, the reaction afterward. I realized that okay, I have to be really good at selling like my head hit when like I get punched, it needs to feel real. First of all trying to fight like the guy was a challenge at first because if I get punched in the face, my head's going to move but I just can't react. But then I realized it's, without getting too hoity-toity about it, it's kind of like what silent film stars used to do. Like Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, where their whole shtick kind of was crazy things happening around them and happening to them, but with no real reaction from them."