Interviews
Michael Peña Talks ‘The Vatican Tapes’ and Wanting To Do More Horror!
Lionsgate Films’ The Vatican Tapes opened this weekend. We managed to snag an interview with actor Michael Peña, who plays Father Lozano in the film, right before he walked into a taping of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.
The Vatican Tapes follows a priest (Peña) and two Vatican exorcists (Djimon Hounsou & Peter Andersson) who must do battle with an ancient satanic force to save the soul of a young woman (Olivia Taylor Dudley). Peña has been acting since 1994, but his most notable films include Crash, Million Dollar Baby, American Hustle, and most recently Marvel’s Ant-Man. Check out our interview with him below!
Q: What can you tell us about your character Father Lozano?
A: Well I grew up Catholic, so this kind of stuff scares the Hell out of me. I love horror movies, though. I love all the Saws and stuff like Paranormal Activity and all that. The Vatican Tapes is a little bit different. It’s a psychological film which I think is cool because if I watch too much of the gory stuff I get desensitized. In that aspect this film is nice. I’m portraying someone like people I knew in Chicago that were priests but they weren’t like everyday priests, you know? They didn’t act all holy and were just regular guys that just happened to be priests. And Lozano is like that. He gets involved in an exorcism. He didn’t look out for something like this, it just happened that way. So that’s my guy.
Q: Because of your beliefs, was there any hesitation to get involved with a film about demonic possession?
A: Yeah because my mom was really heavy into dark spirits and would grab a cold egg and rub it up and down our bodies to take out the evil spirits. Then she would put it in a cup of water and whisper “evil be gone” and I’m like “wow, really? An egg? An egg’s going to catch that?” But after a while, you’d pray that it worked! Ad it’s the kind of thing where we weren’t able to play the Ouija board. We were raised on that stuff, my brother and I, so I was definitely feeling superstitious when I signed on for the film.
Q: Did you do any on-site research for the role? Like visit exorcisms or anything like that?
A: No I didn’t, man. It would have ben cool but there’s not a whole lot of exorcisms on Craigslist, you know? I would have definitely gone. There were pictures of a few exorcisms online, but there’s really not much. I just had to use my imagination and work off the script.
Q: So this is your first horror movie. Could you tell us a little bit about your experiences working on a horror film.
A: I don’t think there’s anything different. You’re basically doing the same thing: reacting off of imaginary circumstances, you know? You want to be able to feel the part and with horror films you get weirded out because of the filming locations, which I think is key. You don’t feel really super comfortable shooting in a place that used to be a mental ward. Imagining the screams and the weird shit that went on is crazy. And you know horror movies do that. Especially with the props and all that. It informs your acting, but you want to put just as much energy in anything regardless of what it is, you know what I mean?
Q: Horror films tend to require a lot of grueling physical activity. Is there one particular stunt/set piece that you found to be the most difficult to shoot?
A: There was one where I’m supposed to jump out of a house. I didn’t find it difficult, I just thought it was cool. I love that kind of stuff. You know you get a little more able. Like for CHiPs I have to get in good shape. Not just to lose weight but to be able to do those functions. I love doing that because I grew up playing sports and I just really enjoy that physical part of it.
Q: There have been a massive influx of possession films to come out in the past few years. What do you think makes The Vatican Tapes stand out more than the others?
A: I don’t know. I don’t think it has to be dramatically different. The narrative and how they film it is different. There’s a little bit of a psychological thriller aspect to it which is really cool. But to me that question is like saying “there’s been a bunch of comedies out lately. What’s different about yours?” It’s just a different kind of possession movie. There’s always action movies, there’s always comedies and there’s always horror movies.
Q: Do you see yourself acting in any other horror films in your future?
A: Yeah you know what? This is a genre that I’m just now getting into and there’s always a lot to learn when you jump genres. I’ve learned a lot and I’ve had a really good time filming. I think I want to do an indie horror film that’s shot very realistically and much more dark than what you typically see, like the first Paranormal Activity. I also want to do a slasher movie with a villain like Freddy Krueger. Then I want to do another one that’s a little bit bigger like Rosemary’s Baby.
Q: So you want to cover the whole board then?
A: Yeah, like for example I just started in comedy. I’ve done my fourth one. I’ve done Ant-Man, which is a super hero thing. I did a smaller one, which is Observe and Report, and then I did Eastbound and Down which is a TV show. But to me they’re all so different. One’s a Marvel movie, one’s a plot-driven comedy, and the other is a single-camera TV show. Those are different sub-genres within the all-encompassing comedy genre and if you’re going to do one genre then you have to do all of its different sub-genres. It’s like golf: you don’t want to play just one hole. You want to play the entire golf course. I just want to stretch my acting muscles and have fun.
The Vatican Tapes opens nationwide on Friday July 24th.
Nothing is the same when two crewmates return to shore in Rose of Nevada, the latest by Enys Men filmmaker Mark Jenkin.
Time and reality blur for stars George Mackay (Wolf, 1917) and Callum Turner (Green Room, “Neuromancer”) in the hallucinatory time travel mystery releasing in New York and Los Angeles theaters on June 19, 2026.
But this isn’t your standard time travel movie.
Rose of Nevada bends time and genre in its exploration of Cornish identity and community, upending the lives of Nick (MacKay) and Liam (Turner). There’s a listless, dreamy quality to the time travel, and for inspired reason: Jenkin approaches it like a haunting.
While time travel was on his mind early in the writing process, Jenkin’s partner and collaborator asked a question that unlocked Rose of Nevada and inspired the filmmaker.
Jenkin explains, “I remember saying to Mary [Woodvine], my partner, who’s in the film, I said to her, ‘God, it really seems like I’ve fallen into this thing of either making films about ghosts or films about time travel,’ and then she said to me, ‘Yeah, but aren’t all ghost stories just time travel films, and aren’t all time travel films just ghost stories?’ And then I thought, ‘Oh, great. So I’m not making two types of films. I’m actually always making one type of film.’ But that was ultimately liberating because I thought there’s a nice gap or a crossover in the perception of genres, there’s a lot of room to play and to be free within that.”
“Once I’d abandoned the idea that I was going to master quantum physics in any academic sense,” the filmmaker continues, “It was incredibly freeing because I thought, ‘Well, I can just set my own rules here,’ and it really doesn’t matter what the rules are as long as you stick to them. You can’t bend them for the sake of the plot or for the sake of a character arc or something. You have to establish those rules upfront and stick to them, which made me really think I’ve got to limit the time travel element. This film can’t be about time travel.“
Bearing the brunt of the time travel disruption is Mackay’s Nick, a man struggling to support his family before the ill-fated voyage upends his entire world. It’s the type of role that was an easy yes for the actor, simply because of the filmmaker behind it.
“I saw Bait at the cinema when it was first out a few years ago and was so struck by it,” Mackay tells BD. “I just hadn’t seen a film like it. I want to work with the best directors. I want to work with the best directors and people who have a singular vision. As an actor, the process of work is almost my biggest draw, as well as what a story’s saying, but I think you learn by doing, and if I can do my bit in as many different ways as possible. The physicality and the discipline of Mark’s filmmaking, how that is so entwined in the DNA of the film, and therefore in the way that I work within it, that was the biggest draw. I’m just a fan of Mark’s. I was just very pleased to be involved.”
That reflects in Rose of Nevada‘s unique casting; Mackay initially was eyed for Liam.
“When I first got the call to meet Mark at the audition stage,” Mackay said, “We didn’t wind up reading scenes, but they said, ‘There’s a project. There are two roles in it that you could be right for, and Mark is leaning towards you for Liam.’ So, I had a look at Liam, Callum’s role, and had my interpretation of the script ready to talk about it and what I thought that character was, who he was, and how I’m thinking about how I might inhabit that or what I saw in him. And when we met, we didn’t talk about the film at all. We spoke about everything else. But following that meeting, I got the message, said, ‘Mark would like you to be part of the film, but he thinks you’re definitely more of a Nick,’ which I think I just may be a complete sheep because I went, ‘Of course I’m Nick.’
Mackay continued, “But it’s funny, I do have in my own life, I just started a family, and so much of my last few years of being has been trying to figure that balance and what that means and how you navigate that. So with family being at its core and all the kind of conundrums that come with staying level with that, that rang true. So I felt like I understood objectively, I have my interpretations of what both men mean to each other and within the story, but then once I was playing Nick, I just became about a very present focus on who he was and what his situation was. What I liked about him is that he’s a very straightforward bloke. In the best possible way, he’s quite a simple man. It’s just he’s in an extraordinary situation.”
Jenkin wrote Rose of Nevada during the pandemic lockdown that had forced a halt in production on Enys Men. He’d return to rewrite once Enys Men had been completed, creating overlap between films. “They are even more in conversation than you’d think because the first draft of Rose of Nevada was before I’d made Enys Men, and then everything I learned through the making of Enys Men, I fed into Rose of Nevada. But also the reaction to Enys Men, all the critics and writers and audience members who are telling me what Enys Men was about. I’m always the last to realize what I’ve done, I think like most filmmakers. You don’t really know what you’ve made a film about until the audience tells you. I was able to feed that into Rose of Nevada and also scale it up a little bit. So, yeah, in some ways it predates Enys Men, and in some ways it follows on from it,” he said.
Jenkin’s latest caps what’s unofficially been dubbed his Cornish trilogy, a moniker that initially surprised the filmmaker, but he’s come to embrace it. A recent revisit of Bait made it even clearer. “I can now understand why people are linking the three films together. I’d forgotten how linked they are, which is amazing, really, considering the first draft of Bait was written in 1999. So, most of my adult life has been one way or another making this trilogy. I am quite looking forward to starting the next chapter.”
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