by Gill Pringle
“We’ve seen films where the antagonist is a beast or an animal and our heroes are being chased, but this has a dynamic that merges both a family dynamic that we are invested in, alongside the thriller aspects,” says the British actor who was drawn to the fact that, in Beast, he wouldn’t be playing the stereotypical action hero, guaranteed to slay the beast and save the day.
In portraying Dr Nate Samuels, a divorced father of two angry teenaged daughters who believe he let their late mother down, his character is more comfortable in the operating room than he is out in the bush where he finds himself totally out of depth.
Marking the sixth time producer Will Packer has worked with the British superstar, he knew Elba would be perfect casting when executive producer Jaime Primak Sullivan called him with the idea of making “Cujo with a lion”.
Fortunately, Elba agreed. “I think it’s a first,” says the actor who’s still in lion-fighting shape despite recently passing the 50 milestone.
Movies like Jaws, King Kong, Anaconda, Jurassic Park and Stephen King’s Cujo have long thrilled audiences with primal stories setting man against beast, and Elba was keen to join that pantheon, with his recent career largely pitching him against sci-fi adversaries.
Elba, whose history with Packer extends back to 2007’s This Christmas and 2009’s Obsessed, was intrigued by the screenplay’s unlikely premise. “Will and I both like to find projects that stretch us,” says the actor.
“When he brought me this script, I was like, ‘Really, Will? Okay. We’re going here…’ We’ve done thrillers before, but this steps into a different realm. That was super exciting, and the script was not only good, but also very fulfilling,” he recalls.
“This film just got better as we got together as a collective. Baltasar [Kormákur, director] added and enriched what was good about it already. It was a no-brainer for me.”
After wrapping George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing [which interestingly will be released 1 week after Beast] in Australia, Elba headed out to South Africa where – unlike his usual roles – he did not find himself hitting the gym every day, this time determined to play a regular man, a father and a doctor, who is forced to reach deep within himself to protect his girls.
And yes, of course, he would be fighting a lion, albeit a CGI lion, but Beast is no superhero flick where he’s required to bring the muscle.
Working with the production team to understand the dynamics of what the lion would actually feel and look like, especially as it attacked, he recalls, “Baltasar and I talked about the massive Barbary lion, which is almost extinct, as a reference.
“When this thing hits the car, you feel the car move. This is not your average lion; this lion is huge. It’s like one car hitting another car. We spent a lot of time giving the audience a sense of this lion’s scale and its power. It’s an incredibly smart and calculating predator,” says Elba.
If Beast delivers on two different themes –nature vs man, and an emotional story about an absentee father struggling to bond with his daughters – then Elba is hard-pressed to describe what attracted him most to the role.
“If I’m honest, all the ingredients for this film are a little bit contradictory, all of it. It’s kind of like, which film do we want to make? A film about loss, and a film about daughters and a father, and being scared? Or do we want to make a film about poaching, or do you want to make a film about the environment?” he muses.
“So, the challenge was trying to put all those ingredients into a cup, which I believe is an innovative spin on man vs beast, the genre. But putting all those ingredients in was trying to do quite a lot, and that was a challenge. But I think what attracted me most, was working with someone like Baltasar who has had real experience in survival films and what happens to human beings in these instances. And then myself, whose done quite a bit of action, but playing a character that isn’t an action hero, he’s a father. So, all of these ingredients made the whole film satisfying to try and pull it off.”
Elba would argue that Beast is actually a film about grief, with both the lion and his character of Dr Samuels dealing with the pain of losing their families.
“I definitely believe the symmetry between man and lion is connected by grief, loss, separation, anger, desperation. They both feel that. And I think that we didn’t want to just villainise the lion and have it become a beast; it needed to have a story, a reason as to why it’s doing this.
“It’s very uncharacteristic for lions, as we know, to do this, so it was important to layer its backstory, but it turns out it’s quite similar in many ways to my character’s backstory, the survival instinct, the separation from family; the loss, the pain and injury – all that stuff seeps into who they both are in the film,” he says.
No stranger to extreme survivalist action, as Kormákur has demonstrated with his films The Deep, Everest and Adrift, the director was eager to embrace the South African savannah, and to really understand the nature of the beast. And, despite the fact that he would be working exclusively with CGI, Kormákur even volunteered to go into a cage with a lion, recalls Packer.
“We had a real lion that we used for reference and, very early on in the process, we met this real lion with his trainer and the trainer allowed Baltasar to go into the cage with the lion,” says Packer.
“But once Balt went in, it was very evident that the lion did not take well to Balt. And the trainer said, ‘Get out! Get out now!’ Like very stern, very specific. So, Balt had to get out, because you have to pay attention because they are wild animals. I don’t know what it was about Balt – it could have been his scent or the way he moves – but there was something about him that the lion did not like.
“But Balt was so willing to get in that cage. He was the only one. None of us were getting in there with him but Balt did, and he survived. That’s very much Balt. He’s a fearless Viking who takes chances.”
Unperturbed, Kormákur has since put his own spin on the lion’s distaste for him.
“Balt likes to say that he’s an alpha predator; that the lion didn’t like him because it was two alpha males about to butt heads. At least that’s the story he tells,” laughs the producer.
Ask Packer if Elba was keen to have a go in the lion cage himself, he smiles, “Yeah, I don’t think Idris was too keen on getting that close up in real life, if we’re being honest.”
Beast is in cinemas August 25, 2022
