Josh Stewart discusses Gore and returning as Arkin with The Fan Carpet’s Lindsey Brown

You may have seen him in the hit US show ‘Grimm’ as a ‘Drang-Zom’, or in the huge box office hit ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ (2012) as Bane’s right hand man Barsad, now you’ll see Josh Stewart return as Arkin in ‘The Collection’, the sequel to the 2009 film ‘The Collector’. In this film Arkin has revenge on his mind as, only days after his escape from one of the collection boxes; he revisits the Collector’s hell-house. 

Our reporter Lindsey Brown had the pleasure of discussing the film with the talented Josh Stewart, he talks about his returning role as Arkin, his intense physical training, his new film ‘Event 15’ and his own reactions to the gory sequel ‘The Collection’.

 

 

How much fun was it as an actor to be given the chance to return to a character that you’ve already played before?

The cool thing about it, from an actor’s stand point, is that you always wish you’d been able to do a little bit more of this or show a little bit more of that, the great thing about doing a sequel is that you then get to go back and add in all of those things that have been eating away at you for the last two and a half years, so that aspect of it is really, really good.

 

How has Arkin changed from the character that he was in the first film?

Well, I think the biggest thing is his motivation; he’s got a little payback on his mind. It’s not like there was any real time lapse between the first and the second movie, it’s really been only about three or four days from the when he was taken in the first one, so there wasn’t time for him to grow or change, it’s more just motivational, it’s like “you got me the first time, you hit me in the face, now I’m coming back to hit you back”.

 

There were quite a lot of fight scenes in ‘The Collection’, what sort of training did you do to prepare for the role physically?

I used to box when I was in college, so three months prior to starting ‘The Collection’ I got a trainer and went back to my old boxing workouts because boxing is all about timing and in a lot of ways it’s very similar to choreography, it’s very rhythmic, and the choreography for fights are very much that way, it’s basically memorising a dance. So foot work and movement wise it definitely helps to find a rhythm, but it also toughens you up. I basically ended every work out with being beat on by my trainer, and then I would take my shirt off and he would beat me with a broomstick in the stomach, back, arms and the chest area, just to toughen me up.

 

Marcus Dunstan has worked on a lot of great horror films, what was it like working on one of them with him?

Well I’m not a big horror guy so I don’t know that world and all of the references; my extent of the horror world is Stephen King movies because my mother was a big Stephen King fan. I was coming to the new horror world as a virgin so to speak – which I think ended up playing to our favour because we weren’t falling into any of those stereotypes. The great thing about Marcus, and his vast knowledge of all this stuff, is that he would just push and pull and direct for the purposes of what he needed those moments and those scenes to look and feel like. I mean the guy’s like an encyclopaedia for that world; there’s nothing that he doesn’t know, there’s no better guy behind you when you have complete ignorance to the genre.

 

You didn’t really see Arkin and the Collector in the same scene much in the first film, what was it like being face-to-face with him in this film? Is he as scary in person as he is on screen?

It was more terrifying in the first one because we were playing this cat and mouse game, I was only ever getting glimpses of him, and there were always these near misses. In the second one, because it was so hands on and face-to-face,  I just know him as the stunt man Randy that was playing him, like I know the guy and we’re buddies [laughs] so it was just like anything else where you’re just doing a scene with another actor.

 

How did it feel being on set with preserved body parts and really gory props?

Gary Tunnicliffe, what that guy created is pretty unbelievable, that was disturbing and set the whole feeling askew more than anything because it’s like you’re just walking into someone’s sick demented head. That’s what the sets felt like because it was essentially a big room that had four walls and was enclosed by doors, so once you were in there you were in there, he built it big enough so that everything could fit inside there plus the cameras, so once you were in there it was like you’re in the fun house now.

 

 

Did you ever get to go into one of the Collector’s boxes?

I did, you know at the beginning of the second movie I start out in the box, so I actually had to have the bottom of the box cut out because I’ve got really bad knees and I can’t get squashed into that thing, and I couldn’t launch myself out of it the way I needed to. I’m so not flexible and with the bad knees there was just no getting inside that thing.

 

You’ve worked on a lot of big budget films like ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ and ‘Law Abiding Citizen’, in comparison this film had a relatively smaller budget – does the dynamic on set change as a result of that?

Of course there are a lot of things that change as far as logistics, like on ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ a lot of those scenes took lots of time to set up and re-set, you’re dealing with tanks and you’re dealing with re-loading a lot of guns so it would slow the process down. But honestly once you’re in front of the camera it’s all the same, it doesn’t matter if it is a 100 dollar movie or a 250 million dollar movie, once the camera’s rolling it becomes about telling a story.

 

So even though you were a part of the movie and you know it inside and out, are you able to watch it back and be scared by it as an audience member? 

You know what’s crazy, I really enjoyed watching Batman because so much of the story was kept a secret, and there were so many things that we weren’t even privy to, so it was cool to see things because a lot of it was the first time seeing it. With ‘The Collection’ there were a lot of things that made me uneasy like the blood and the guts, I don’t care how many takes we did of the scene when my arm breaks in that movie – I shot the thing I know that was a prosthetic arm, I know how we did it and I’ve seen it five thousand times – and I can’t watch it without grabbing my crotch and closing my eyes and wanting to vomit, just that uneasiness of seeing that, the blood and the guts gets me every single time.

 

So you’re not much of a gore fan then?

No, it kills me, I’m such a pus when it comes to that.

 

Would you consider coming back to play Arkin again if a third film is to be released?

When you’re dealing with multiples of movies and sequels, as long as the story and everything is being honourable to what we’ve already done, and we can improve on it, make it better or add to it in some  creative and really cool way then I’m all for it. A lot of times I think it just becomes about a smash and grab job where you’re just like “these were successful let’s just do another one” and then I’m not much interested. But I don’t think that these guys would do that, if we were to do another one, they would do it the right way.  So absolutely, I would definitely be up for it.

 

You recently finished making ‘Event 15’, can you tell me a little bit about that?

Yeah, it’s a thriller about some soldiers coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan suffering from PTSD and they are part of some trials to help combat this huge problem that I think the world is facing. The movie details that and how it affects some and how it affects others. It has a really smart script and a really cool director and cast, I’ve seen the movie it’s really really freaking good, so I think you’ll be hearing more from that very shortly.

 

 

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