Interviews
WWE’s Kane Says ‘See No Evil 2’ Will Surprise Fans #SDCC
Interview By Steve Barton
When he walked into the room, he nearly blotted out the sun that was peering through the hotel window while shining brightly on the 2014 San Diego Comic-Con. There I was, ready to go one-on-one with the demon Kane, and I managed to come out without a scratch.
Before I begin, at this time I’d like to thank Kane for not chokeslamming me when I tried putting him in a sleeper. Of course I kid, but he was eyeballing some chairs and tables ominously during our interview about the resurrection of Jacob Goodnight for the Lionsgate / WWE Studios film See No Evil 2.
“I was sort of shocked to get the call really because the first movie had been a commercial success with WWE Studios’ debut film, and I thought, ‘Okay, we’re going to do a sequel pretty quickly,’ and it didn’t happen for, like, several years,” Glenn Jacobs, better known as Kane, tells us. “So, my phone rang one day and I was like, ‘Really? Okay. Isn’t it six years late?’ I was really surprised to get the call after having all that time pass. I didn’t think we’d do another one.”
When last we saw Goodnight, a dog was unceremoniously peeing into his shattered eye cavity after a night of violent killing. I immediately wondered if his first order of business would be to track down that piss-happy pooch.
“I’m an animal lover; I wouldn’t let that happen! But okay, the plot point of how are you going to bring him back? He was killed pretty definitively at the end of the first movie. But you’re dealing with fantasy horror so I guess he wasn’t killed as badly as we thought he was. I think he’s more angry this time around and I think what you saw in the first movie… well, there’s a lot more of that. There is a lot of action in this movie, there’s more fight sequences. The victims actually fight back, which is a little different, especially [Kaj-Erik’s] character who I had a couple of pretty long and complex fight sequences with. So, yeah, there’s even more of that in this one. Also the [Soska] twins know how to take advantage of people’s strengths, and of course, my strength is my size. I am a very big guy and I think that they, when they were putting things together, I think they made a concerted effort to accentuate that as much as possible.”
Jacobs’ co-star in the film, Danielle Harris, is just about two feet shorter than he is. Given this fact I inquired as to their on-screen dynamic. “It’s funny because Danielle was saying how people are surprised. She’s a very diminutive girl despite the fact that she generally plays a really tough girl. Danielle’s role is a little different in this movie. She’s not the one out there trying to kick butt; she’s more the voice of reason trying to hold everything together. Frankly, everyone in the movie was great to work with; the entire cast was really great.”
Kane also has a soft spot for his directors, Jen and Sylvia Soska. “They were awesome. They bring so much excitement and so much enthusiasm to the set. We had fifteen shooting days, which is pressure packed. No matter how hard you try, there’s going to be points you feel you’ve fallen behind schedule. Everybody was freaking out except the twins. I was just so impressed by them. Their knowledge and their skill is amazing; they helped me a lot as far as my role. I can’t speak highly enough of their talent.”
In terms of being able to act on screen, Kane points to his WWE roots as his training. “To a certain extent I think acting is an extension of what we do at WWE. At the company, we do a lot of theatrics, especially my character is a lot of acting. In the WWE, you have two different kinds of performers: You have the guy whose character is just an extension of who he is in real life, and then you have the ones that are completely different who are acting. I’m nothing like Kane. I’m one of the guys who has a character. So, acting really is an extension of what I do on WWE but it’s a lot different when you’re on a soundstage. Everything is very antiseptic and very sterile. I’ve worked so many years with the WWE. The approach is you have one take on live TV, so you get it right. It’s funny because when I do do movies, they go to rehearsals and after a couple of rehearsals they go, ‘You don’t actually do this until the light comes on, do you?’ I have to go all out on that one take so rehearsals are actually sort of hard for me because I’m like, ‘This is boring; let’s just cut to the chase!’ That’s a little different than what directors and other members of the crew are used to.”
Would Jacobs be willing to step back into Jacob’s blood-drenched shoes? “I think so. If I had another opportunity to work with the twins again. Talking about acting, I would like to do some other things as well. I would branch out. WWE has been awesome for me. Sometimes you hear bad things about Vince McMahon, and for me, you never hear the other side of the story. Certainly, I wouldn’t be where I am, my family wouldn’t be in the position they’re in, if it hadn’t been for him. But I’ve been doing this incarnation of Kane for a long time and, as a performer, you do want to stretch and you do want to do different things. The most fun I’ve had at WWE was doing Team Hell No with Daniel Bryan because I went from being the most stark guy on the show to being the comic relief. As a performer, that’s really rewarding that you can do both. So, I would like to do some different things. I do like the horror genre, I’m a fan myself. My favorite movie of all time is Silence of the Lambs. I love the ‘Hannibal’ series because here you have a guy who’s very smart. The monstrous part of him is his intelligence and not his physical size. That’s what scares me. Moving forward, I would like to do some other things.”
Jacobs continues. “I think people are going to be very surprised in this movie as far as what Jacob does with some of the scenes. You actually have your psychopathic killer acting, which is something you don’t see that often. I wore a mask for years and the disadvantage of that is, as human beings, we portray most emotions with our face and I had to do it with body language. Really, the essence of the WWE is we’re trying to elicit an emotional reaction from the crowd just like you are in a movie. It’s the same deal. I understood how you get those emotions out of people. If you can’t have your number one asset, and you can do it with your number two asset, once you get your number one asset, you’re going to be pretty good at it.”
In closing I asked Kane what his take on Goodnight is being that he’s played a villain, and at times a hero, for so long. “Jacob was just a normal little boy like all of us. If there is any sort of social commentary, which I hesitate to say that there is, but if there is, it’s the fact that… well… Danielle Harris put it best. She just got married and they’re working on a family and she’s like, ‘I have to be really careful how I raise my kids and raise them correctly, or THIS comes out!’ and she points straight at me! *laughs* Jacob wasn’t born the way that he is; he was made to be that way.”
Lionsgate will handle worldwide distribution of See No Evil 2, while WWE Studios will utilize its extensive global reach through television, digital, and social media and print assets to market the film.
In the sequel, “Jacob Goodnight (WWE superstar “Kane”) fell to his apparent demise from high atop the Blackwell Hotel in See No Evil, and this terrifying sequel picks up where the last one left off. With Jacob’s body lying on a cold sub-basement slab in the city morgue, Amy (Danielle Harris), a mortician, is surprised when a group of friends pay her a late-night visit for her birthday. But the surprise soon turns deadly when the psychopath everyone believed to be dead sets-out on a horrific killing spree, and Amy and her friends must do whatever it takes to survive.”
Greyston Holt (“Bitten,” Lost Boys: The Tribe), Chelan Simmons (Tucker & Dale vs. Evil), Kaj-Erik Eriksen (Ice Twisters), and Lee Majdoub (Soldiers of the Apocalypse) star alongside Danielle Harris (the Halloween franchise), Katharine Isabelle (American Mary, Ginger Snaps, Freddy vs. Jason), and Michael Eklund (The Call, The Marine 3: Homefront, The Day) in the Soska Sisters-helmed See No Evil 2 starring WWE Superstar Kane.
Interviews
Paul Tremblay on Fighting AI with Horror in New Novel ‘Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep’
Paul Tremblay didn’t start his writing career believing he’d be battling machines over the sanctity of his job, but like so many writers of his generation, the battle found him. In the years since Large Language Models (LLMs) and neural networks started gaining traction as an advertised shortcut to creativity, Tremblay has been active in lawsuits to prevent the use of his works in training AI models, and he’s found that, with each new project, he has to consider the possibility that some LLM, somewhere, is going to latch on to what he’s creating.
“Now I feel like I’m thinking about, ‘Man, how am I going to write things that would be really hard or impossible for an AI to replicate?’,” Tremblay told me, speaking by Zoom from his home in Massachusetts. “Maybe some of that is ego. I’m sure every writer thinks, ‘Oh, an AI could never write what I write.’ Yes, I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of the thought process.”
While that’s something Tremblay might consider with any new work at this point in his career, the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts, The Cabin at the End of the World, and many other novels and short stories tackled it in a more direct way with his latest book. Inspired by Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, and the quirky humor of the Coen Brothers, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is Tremblay’s attempt at a sci-fi-horror mash-up that’s both darkly funny and existentially nightmarish. It’s also, in his own words, a screed against the movement by AI companies to supplant human artists.
“I didn’t want to make it too didactic, but no, I playfully described this book as an anti-AI screed,” he said. “This book, in particular, was driven by anger and frustration, for sure. Not every book is going to be driven that way.“
Despite the emotions that fueled it, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep does not read like a screed. Instead, wielding offbeat humor and tech concepts that feel both lived-in and frighteningly tactile, the book lays out tandem narratives all building to the same conclusion, each of them exploring our relationship to machine learning in a different way. One of these narratives belongs to Julia, a former gaming streamer looking for a new challenge in life, who gets a call from a California tech company with an interesting offer.
Paul Tremblay in documentary series “First Word on Horror”
The company has, it seems, implanted some new technology in a brain-dead middle-aged man which will, in theory, allow them to pilot the man’s body through a rudimentary, still-developing system of controls. Julia, with her gaming background, would be the pilot, in her own way just as much a test subject as the human vegetable she’s controlling.
Julia is a Gen Z streamer with an omnivorous pop culture appetite, inspired by Tremblay’s own adult children, who riffs on The Big Lebowski constantly and calls her strange new meat puppet “Bernie” in reference to Weekend at Bernie’s. Her wide frame of reference, and her interest in art and stories far beyond video games, is in part informed by Tremblay’s own experiences with Gen Z, and in part a response to AI companies who scrape art and culture as a means of consuming it for reference without really experiencing a story.
“I know that one of the arguments that OpenAI and other tech companies are trying to make is like, ‘Hey, you writers, you artists, you take pop culture, you take your influences, and you create something. That’s just the same thing that the bots are doing.’ And it’s just not,” Tremblay said. “I wanted to have Julia have her outlook informed by all this pop culture, and I wanted to make that feel really human as a way to show how inhuman the AI is.”
The other side of the story belongs to “Bernie,” who’s addressed in his point-of-view chapters as “You.” In these chapters, the technology in Bernie’s body starts to flicker images through his seemingly dead brain, delivering half-remembered imagery and perspective in a nod to the “hallucinations” of an AI model groping for understanding it can never reach. These chapters in particular show off Tremblay’s flair for formalist shake-ups, and echo the kind of hyperstimulated writing that Dick and Ellison made so influential.
“I think it was more just the general Philip K. Dick feeling of ‘The world is so strange,'” Tremblay said. “He’s a lot funnier, I think, than maybe a lot of people credit him. That’s definitely what I was thinking of when writing the book.“
Bernie’s chapters embody the strangeness of Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, presenting imagery that’s at times puzzling, at times eerily filmic, and always unnerving. They also mirror Julia’s own journey in fascinating ways as the odd couple – the Gen Z gamer and the middle-aged vegetable – traverse the United States, and the tech in Bernie’s body wakes up to the possibilities of using his flesh for its own purposes. It’s a compelling narrative technique, but it presented some new writing challenges for Tremblay.
“I quickly realized I couldn’t write this book the same way I have in the past,” he said. “By that, I mean all my other novels I had written in the order in which it was presented, even things that are nonlinear, which is most of them. I knew I couldn’t do that in this book. It’s not a spoiler, but hopefully the readers figure out pretty early that the Bernie chapters are a little bit of a preview of the next chapter from Julia, what’s actually happening with Julia. It’s all refracted from him.”
Mary Roach’s Stiff
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep began with a simple image, inspired by Tremblay’s reading of Mary Roach‘s book chronicling the history of our treatment of corpses, Stiff. As he read, Tremblay imagined a body sitting on an airplane, remote-controlled by someone else. At the time, it was a “silly what-if” concept, filed away in his head. Years later, when he became an author suing a tech company to keep AI from scraping his work for ideas, it started to feel frighteningly plausible, taking the “silly what-if” into the territory of a high-concept horror show about what happens when we try to exploit and commodify uniquely human aspects of consciousness.
“It stuck with me,” Tremblay said of that what-if imagery. “And then a few years later, when I was a part of the case suing OpenAI on behalf of writers, that what-if suddenly didn’t seem as silly. The more I learned about how that corporation operates and without really any sort of ethical thought to anything, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to play with that. That’s actually happening.”
So, what if someone actually in favor of generative AI picks up Tremblay’s self-described “anti-AI screed?” He hopes that, at the very least, he’s made the ride enjoyable in a distinctly human way that might begin to reshape the conversation.
“I think that was another reason why I wanted to have the humor,” Tremblay said. “If people are reading this book who aren’t on the side of like, ‘Hey, LLMs taking authors’ books is bad,’ maybe if they read something that’s cut with some humor, that maybe they’ll be more easily swayed.”
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is now in bookstores everywhere.
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