Home Movies

Exclusive Interview With Ebon Moss-Bachrach On Come Out And Play

Actor Ebon Moss-Bachrach has been doing his thing around Hollywood, showing up in a pretty decent array of material, but no previous work our heroic actor has ever done could prepare him for a leading role in Makinov's Come Out And Play. Playing the lead character Francis, Ebon has to face off against an island full of murderous children, all the while protecting his pregnant wife played by Vinessa Shaw. Talk about the vacation from hell.

Recommended Videos

We Got This Covered: What about the dock scene, which is an awful violent part involving Francis. How did you act your way through that mentally?

Ebon Moss-Bachrach: We shot that somewhere in the last two days, and I was pretty exhausted by that point. That had to be very technical, because otherwise the kids were going to get hurt. If we shot it how we did like in the scene with Vinessa and the jail cell, with the same abandon, it would have been really dangerous. That was much more “pieces by the numbers” so to speak.

I was so tired, and I’d gotten beat up a lot during the filming, and I think that exhaustion helped. I had this big oar to swing around which was so damn heavy. [Laughs] I’m not one of these actors who’s really fit. I was struggling to keep up with these kids who had endless energy and are running around me again and again.

We also had a really good stunt coordinator though who had been training these kids every day almost like it was the military. Every day they’d be out doing exercises like push-ups, running in formation, and they were working on choreographing that dock scene every single day that we shot. They did all the hard work. [Laughs]

We Got This Covered: So you’ve seen the finished product already, and I would love to know what went through your mind watching some of the darker moments found in Come Out And Play?

Ebon Moss-Bachrach: It’s very critical. I see things I wish I could have done better, things only caught that day, and it’s hard for me to be objective about it to be honest. I was happy with the dock scene though.

Most of the time when I see myself in stuff it’s never an experience I look forward to, but I personally liked watching Come Out And Play because it’s easily the most unrealistic film I’ve ever made. It exists in a genre that doesn’t really mirror too much of the world that I live in.

When I pick up that oar though, that stuff is hard to watch. That I don’t need to see again. Once was enough. It makes me think a lot about my family while considering some type of career spiral towards something different [Laugh] thinking “What am I doing with my life!” It’s not like I’ve made a career out of roles like this but it’s definitely weird, it’s weird to me.

We Got This Covered: So you mentioned this isn’t something you’d like to really return to, but was it fun participating in the horror genre? Would you ever want to return?

Ebon Moss-Bachrach: You know, I would return to it. I didn’t think I would actually like it, but I was telling another interviewer that when they were talking to me about doing the movie, I said I’m not a real big fan of gory stuff, and they said “Well this movie has deeper political undertones and implications,” and that’s one of the ways they hooked me. For me, the movie doesn’t really stand as a metaphor for anything and isn’t an allegorical comment on society which I think the orignal did a little more effectively, but the first day of shooting I was just fired up to see how we could make this as fucked up as possible. How crazy could we go. That was really fun, I got into that, and that was surprising.

We Got This Covered: So you’re done with Come Out And Play now, but what can we look forward to seeing you in next?

Ebon Moss-Bachrach: I just yesterday finished a movie called Gods Behaving Badly, which was a movie I did with Big Beach here in New York, and it’s kind of a big ensemble romantic type of adventure movie taking place in modern day New York with kind of a Greek mythology backdrop. There’s all these Greek Gods living as New Yorkers, and I play a guy who’s tentatively falling in love with Alicia Silverstone, and all these Gods – Zeus (played by Christopher Walken) and Aphrodite (played by Sharon Stone) – Edie Falco and a bunch of others are all in the middle of our love affair. For various reasons I have to go to the Underworld and save our world, so it’s sort of a light-hearted and fun adventure movie I just finished. That was a very different kind of movie.

We Got This Covered: Did you have any fun interactions with Christopher Walken on set?

Ebon Moss-Bachrach: Unfortunately the only interaction I had with Christopher Walken was in a scene where I have to fight Hades, played by John Turturro, and Christopher Walken steps in to save me in a way. I’m down on the floor bleeding the whole scene, so I actually had to act knocked out for the whole thing. I could hear the two of them having a scene above my head, but that was about it on my interactions with Christopher.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Ebon for giving us an exclusive interview, and be sure to catch Come Out And Play in theaters March 22nd – or right now through most VOD platforms!