Josh Hutcherson, Seth Rogen, Eliza Coupe and more chat about Hulu’s Future Man Series
At San Diego Comic-Con yesterday, director and executive producer Seth Rogen gave us a sneak peek at Hulu‘s Future Man series starring Josh Hutcherson (‘Josh Futturman’), Eliza Coupe (‘Tiger’), Derek Wilson (‘Wolf’). The show is the story of a janitor by day who is also a gamer (Hutcherson). Two warriors come from the future (Coupe and Wilson) and tell him he’s the best hope humanity has of saving the world. We got a chance to chat with them, as well as executive producers Ben Karlin, Kyle Hunter and Ariel Shaffir. Check out what they had to say about the Future Man series below, and scroll down for the teaser.
The producers were asked for their pitch for the show. Hunter told us, “We started developing it as a movie, but we felt like, by the time we got to the end of writing it… this doesn’t feel like a story that wraps up at the end like movies do in an hour and a half. Especially when we incorporated more time travel elements. You could literally go anywhere, do anything, and the plot is endless. We decided to start developing it as a TV show, and the movie script that we wrote is sort of a basis to pitch it around. And Hulu has been great. They definitely gravitated to the more subversive elements, and we felt like they would be great partners.” They joked about calling out films like The Last Starfighter, Back to the Future and more in the Future Man series.
Coupe and Wilson talked about their characters, Tiger and Wolf, respectively. Coupe explained that they are from the future. “We are very far in the future. We’re from 2162 and we are in constant battle our whole lives so we don’t know anything different. We want to find our savior. We create something to try to find our savior to go back and stop something.” Wilson added, “Yeah, we come from a place that’s very violent and we live in a sewer.” “We eat rats,” Coupe chimed in. “And garbage,” Wilson said. “So, we’re coming to save the world, and also we’re being affected by what we see and experience in this time.” They told us that they play these characters very straight and that they get to travel to the 1940s, ’60s and ’80s during the course of the season.
Hutcherson, who dances in the show, told us that he got to do “some crazy dancing in this show!” Though we didn’t see the dancing, the group joked about using the game Dance, Dance Revolution to save the world. Hutcherson said, “You’re not that far off, in a way. I’m in a moon suit in the 1960s, and, in order to save all mankind, basically, there is a form of a dance battle. It’s complicated.” He told us that he’s excited for us to see the journey he goes on. He said, “One moment you’ll see a joke and that becomes an entire plot point. It’s just a kind of ridiculous ride that it goes on. [The Future Man series] walks a line between tones, where you have real life or death situations where people are very serious about saving the world. The fate of humanity is on the like, while you’re also doing something absurd, maybe involving dead possums. Maybe not.”
Hutcherson told us about the video game references in the show. He said, “It definitely, as far as references and what it pays homage to is more in the world of sci-fi films, and especially the ’80s films. A lot of Back to the Future, Terminator, The Last Starfighter, Quantum Leap, a lot of stuff in that world. But the video game element, Josh [his character] is a hardcore gamer, so the game world that we live in is the game world we created for the show, which is The Bionic Wars, so most references – we live in that world and we don’t break out of that too much.” Hutcherson said he’s not a huge gamer. In fact, the internet actually stopped working in his house two years ago and he “can’t get online or get anything streaming… it drives me nuts.” He told us that the ’80s in the show was big for his character. “It’s a real mind f*** for him. It gets dark. It gets crazy. He’s at his wits’ end.”
Rogen, who said his first Comic-Con was ten years ago, joked about the time travel planning boards for the show being like a scene from Homeland. He told us the show, “was inspired by first person shooters that have very rough, brutish characters that seem like maybe they’d be interesting to interact with, but then the joke is, that when they come to life, they’re horrible and they just want to kill indiscriminately and they hold no value for human life and come from a time when everyone is dead anyway, and it would be very difficult to navigate working with them. And that is a large part of the show as well — people play these video games and the go, it would be fun to go into that video game world. But the truth is, if you were going into a post-apocalyptic world, it would be a f****** nightmare!”
That Future Man series premieres on Hulu on November 14. Are you guys excited for what’s coming? Let us know in the comments or tweet us @ComingSoonnet.
