Your Monster stars Edmund Donovan and Kayla Foster discussed their roles in the horror romantic comedy movie. Distributed by Vertical, the film is now playing in theaters.
“Your Monster tells the story of the soft-spoken actor Laura Franco (Melissa Barrera), who is dumped by her longtime boyfriend (Edmund Donovan) while recovering from surgery and retreats to her childhood home to recover. With her future looking bleak, insult is added to injury when Laura discovers her ex is staging a musical that she helped him develop. But out of these gut-wrenching life changes emerges a monster (Tommy Dewey) with whom she finds a connection, encouraging Laura to follow her dreams, open her heart, and fall in love with her inner rage,” says the synopsis.
Tyler Treese: Edmund, your character in Your Monster breaks up with his girlfriend while she’s undergoing cancer treatment. It’s not the greatest introduction. What did you think about Jacob when you were reading the script and seeing what kind of guy he was?
Edmund Donovan: Yeah, man, it’s rough. I responded mostly to how funny I think the script is, and how it offers such a great opportunity for an actor who has history in the theater to sort of send up some of the things that are silly in theater people. But I had to humanize him to a degree. I had to understand why he was doing what he is doing. But it’s hard to justify it.
Kayla, I love the musical within the movie aspect of this, especially in the last act, where we actually get to see the musical going on. How was it getting to perform and do those? They’re a delight to watch.
Kayla Foster: Oh my God, it was insane and crazy. It takes years to put up a Broadway musical and we did it in two days, so it was lunacy. Actually, there are more songs that we shot that are not even in the movie. We were ambitious, and we went for it. It was really fun and crazy. We were also doing rehearsals, like dance rehearsals, amidst the entire production. So to get to do it was really fun.
I am certainly not a real dancer, and we had real Broadway-level dancers there, so I loved watching them. I was trying to be like, “Can you guys tell me if I look like a complete idiot?” and “Can I just stand behind you while you look beautiful and elegant?”
You kept up with everyone and were in sync, so it all worked out.
Edmund, you’re playing the director. Did you draw from any aspects of your actual theater background for that character?
Donovan: Yeah, I guess. No one specifically, but absolutely. I think he’s just this guy who’s… and we’ve all known people like this in any profession, really, but maybe they’re more common in our profession — in theater. But he’s just this guy who has a total lack of self-awareness and a lack of awareness of his own blind spots and the things that he doesn’t know. He’s sort of holier than thou and thinks he’s brilliant. A woke, perfect guy, and he’s actually incredibly insensitive.
Your Monster is now playing in theaters.
