ComingSoon’s Jonathan Sim recently sat down with director Osgood Perkins (Longlegs) and actor Theo James (Divergent, The White Lotus) about their new movie The Monkey.
“When twin brothers find a mysterious wind-up monkey, a series of outrageous deaths tear their family apart,” reads the official synopsis for Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey. “Twenty-five years later, the monkey begins a new killing spree, forcing the estranged siblings to confront the cursed toy.”
Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey arrives in theaters on February 21 from Neon.
Jonathan Sim: This movie starts out with Hal and Bill when they were kids and how the trauma of what happened to them affected their adulthood. Oz, I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you grew up and how you believe that that’s going on to affect the type of movies that you make now as an adult.
Osgood Perkins: There’s kind of this weird thing where you’re lucky to experience tragedy. And by that, I mean that you’re forced into a sort of awareness, a gratitude, a humility about life itself. And so I think that instead of making a picture that vilifies death, maybe making a movie that sort of laughs with it felt like the right kind of move, especially for these days when the world is looking a little grim. It felt like a nice piece of entertainment was probably on the menu.
And do you think that this movie is going to affect audiences in a very different way from your previous movies or do you think that it’s going to affect them in a similar sort of way?
Perkins: I know it’s gonna affect them in a different way. I’ve seen it with audiences and I think that as much as people liked Longlegs, I think there was still sort of a layer of difficulty with the material. There were some questions, there was some symbolism, there was some mystery to it that kept people a little bit like, “I think I really love this movie.” With The Monkey, it’s kind of like, “here’s a dinner plate with all of your favorite bites on it.” And everybody’s just been like, eating it up and laughing and screaming and laughing and screaming and there’s a lot of appreciation for I think just the purity of entertainment in this case.
Theo James: Oz has literally been going around the country, you know, doing Q&A’s and watching people’s reactions in different cities all over America. So he would know, right?
Perkins: I would know. I’m an expert.
Yes, he would. Now Theo, I wanna say you such do such a phenomenal job playing twin brothers and shout out to Christian Convery. Theo, who was your favorite twin and why?
James: I loved Bill. I think I think he’s such a kind of weird child, f**k-up, desperately wanting to be loved. Somewhere in the mess of him, there’s a good person, but it’s been covered in a shroud of deadly toxicity and a yearning to be loved by his mother. I think he’s a really rich person and someone that you kind of want to have a beer with. Or two.
Yeah, definitely. I can really see that. Now I’m gonna paint a picture for you guys. You go home tonight after a long day of doing press for this movie, you take a shower, you pull back the curtain and you see the monkey is sitting there waiting for you. What is your response in that situation?
James: Open-mouth kiss.
Perkins: Um, how did you get this number?
Yeah, you know what? That makes sense. I think I would be much more scared than you guys, but you know what, you guys are professionals, so I’ll give it to you guys.
Perkins: Thanks a lot.
Stephen King called this movie “batshit insane.” What was your reaction when a legendary author like Stephen King praises your adaptation of his work?
Perkins: I said, “Oh man, thank God.”
James: Totally. He’s such a seminal dude and you know, I haven’t met him, but Oz met him recently and had back and forth with him while making the movie. But he seems to be a fan and he’s so seminal in the literature space as well as the horror space. I mean, having any kind of positive support for what Oz has done is just a dream come true.
I was thinking actually about that monkey thing. I remember when The Ring came out, the Naomi Watts one, which was pretty good, I think. Great movie, right? And it was when I was in my first year of college and they had this thing where you could put up a screensaver on your laptop, so we put it up on a friend’s laptop and he was working on his thesis late at night, and then he woke up in the middle of the night and there was just the hole and the woman crawling out.
Thank you to Osgood Perkins and Theo James for speaking with ComingSoon about The Monkey.
