In this exclusive chat, “Rebel Moon” stars Charlie Hunnam and Michiel Huisman talk about their excitement for the LA premiere, character transformations, and the mind-blowing, freaky elements in this unique sci-fi adventure. "Rebel Moon" lands on Netflix on December 22, 2023!
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00:00 Amazing. First they put me on the IV and paracetamol.
00:04 This is Caitlin.
00:05 Hello. How are you?
00:07 How are you? Nice to see you.
00:08 I'm great. How are you?
00:09 Good. Thank you.
00:10 How's it going?
00:12 So excited.
00:13 JP, let's go ahead and roll Dex. And Caitlin, you can slate your name and outlet, please.
00:18 Okay. I'm Caitlin McDaniel. I'm with Rainbow Media Co.
00:21 I'm so excited to be talking to the stars of Netflix's Rebel Moon.
00:25 How excited are you two to be here today?
00:27 Really excited.
00:29 Very, very excited.
00:31 And tonight is going to be a good night for us, too.
00:34 Absolutely.
00:35 We have the premiere here in LA.
00:38 I think it's going to be good.
00:41 Yes. I'm excited to be there as well. So I'll see you.
00:43 Oh, I'll see you there.
00:44 Yes. For all the audiences to really get to know these characters.
00:48 So just to start off, I mean, Mikheil, your character Gunnar is a tender-hearted farmer,
00:54 but he also is thrust into this whole experience he's not really expecting.
00:58 So how did you kind of navigate that transformation?
01:01 Yeah. I mean, he's definitely tender-hearted.
01:06 He's pretty naive at the beginning of our story.
01:09 He makes a grave mistake, and I think Rebel Moon Part 1, for my character,
01:16 is very much about finding redemption.
01:19 And so I guess that was maybe my way into this character, you know?
01:24 Absolutely.
01:25 Yeah.
01:26 And just going over to you, Charlie, your character is definitely very different.
01:30 He's a little more roguish, a little more charming.
01:33 So how fun was it to get to play a character like that?
01:36 I loved it.
01:37 I read the script, and, you know, sometimes an actor has to do a lot of work to--
01:43 you know, it'll be evident on the page that the character's great
01:47 and that you might be drawn to playing it,
01:50 but it doesn't necessarily mean that you immediately know the character.
01:54 I just felt like he was an old pal.
01:57 I just liked him.
01:59 I'd been wanting an opportunity to play this sort of character for a long time
02:05 and just leapt off the page.
02:07 And I just had great fun reading it the first time,
02:11 and then every step of the process of actually filming it was sort of in that spirit.
02:15 Absolutely.
02:16 And, I mean, just overall, the film,
02:19 Zack Snyder said that he really felt this project gave him the freedom
02:22 to kind of push sci-fi boundaries.
02:25 He said he used the word "make it freakier" than some things we've seen.
02:30 I can hear him say, "Make it freakier."
02:32 Right?
02:33 And just kind of bring more diverse characters.
02:36 So I just wanted to ask you both, I mean, did you feel that on set,
02:39 that that was something that we were doing?
02:41 I felt super creative.
02:43 Yes.
02:44 Just think back to, for example, the first scene where your character is seen,
02:51 your character is introduced, like the characters around us.
02:54 I mean, the parasite guy and all that stuff.
02:56 It feels like there's a lot of characters in our movie that we've never seen anywhere before.
03:05 Yeah, I agree.
03:06 It felt like exactly what Zack had expressed to you,
03:12 that it was an opportunity to just go play in the playground of his imagination for him
03:18 and to bring a world that he'd been fantasizing and thinking about for many, many years to life.
03:24 And we were fortunate to be not only invited for the journey, but invited to participate.
03:30 Like he wanted us to get freaky right along with him.
03:35 And just going kind of off of the freakier, there's a lot of interesting characters.
03:40 So have you been able to see what they're going to really look like on screen,
03:43 or is that going to be a surprise for tonight?
03:45 You know, people that you might not have on set seen the full potential of what they're going to look like.
03:50 We've already both seen them.
03:51 Yes, so you're excited.
03:53 A couple of times.
03:54 But it was very exciting to see it for the first time.
03:57 I must say, not as surprising as you might imagine,
04:01 because Zack shoots a lot practically, way more practically,
04:04 as opposed to visual effects, special effects, than you might imagine for a movie of this type and size.
04:11 So we saw a lot. Like everything that was in our immediate vicinity was for the most part real.
04:17 And then, you know, it was sort of the world rendering in the background that was designed after the fact.
04:23 And that was very fun to see for the first time.
04:25 As far as creatures, the first one that comes to mind for me is Harmada.
04:29 The spider played by Gina Malone.
04:33 You know, I mean, that scene took forever to shoot.
04:38 Yes, it did. And obviously the spider was not there.
04:41 So it was an amazing stunt team, but...
04:44 By forever, what he means is 18 days, and we stood in the background.
04:49 It was a big shoot.
04:52 But it was exciting to finally see how all those green guys sort of came together in a huge spider.
05:04 Absolutely. Well, congratulations to you both. That's all the time I have. But thank you so much.
05:08 Thank you.
05:10 the other side.