Interviews
[Interview] Elden Henson Talks the Most Horrifying Sequence in ‘The Hunger Games!’
With The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 hitting theaters this weekend, Bloody Disgusting had a chance to catch up with actor Elden Henson, who plays the mute Avox Pollux in the film (for the uninitiated, Avoxes are Capitol traitors who have their tongues ripped out as punishment). We discussed his role in the film, the most horrific sequence in the entire Hunger Games franchise and Marvel’s Daredevil!
Bloody Disgusting: Hi!
Elden Henson: Hi!
BD: I got to see the film last night and I really enjoyed it!
EH: Oh good!
BD: So your character Pollux, being an Avox, doesn’t have any dialogue in the film. Is it difficult for you as an actor to play a character that has no lines?
EH: I think I probably had some fears when I first got the job but those fears quickly went away when I started working and talking with Francis [Lawrence] about the character. I was such a big fan of his before we worked together and he totally surpassed my expectations. The great thing about him is that he not only has a great visual style but he’s a great storyteller which is really important. We were having dinner before we started shooting and he said something that really resonated with me and helped me get into the character. He said “Just remember that with all the terrible things Pollux has gone through he still chooses to see the beauty in the world” and that really put me in a place where I thought I could do this. To have a director that you completely trust is a real luxury as an actor, and I trust Francis. And being able to work with someone like Jen, when she’s giving those impassioned speeches it’s like I don’t even have to act. They’re actually moving. So I’m not so much acting as much as I am being present.
BD: I can imagine. There are a lot of characters/actors in the film and I imagine it can be difficult to give everyone a special moment, but Pollux is the centerpiece in, in my opinion, what is one of the most thrilling sequences in the film with the mutt attack in the sewers. How was filming that scene? I guess what I’m asking is: was it fun?
EH: [laughs] It was but it was a little bit challenging, especially for Liam because he’s so tall. You couldn’t really stand up all the way in those tunnels and there was water in all the tunnels so I just remember being wet for a couple of weeks. I was really excited about that sequence because when we were shooting Francis sometimes listens to music when we’re shooting something that doesn’t have any dialogue in it so there’s this shot of us running through the tunnels and he called me to the side to show me some playback while listening to the music he was listening to and I remember thinking “Man, this sequence is going to be awesome!” And then when I saw it in the final product I was totally blown away. I mean I was there shooting it and I was still blown away. The mutts came out great to, because on the day of shooting it was a bunch of stunt people in onesies with green dots all over them. It was hilarious but we all had to try to be scared and it was just a fun sequence to shoot.
BD: Did they have sound effects for them as you were shooting or was it just people in the onesies running around?
EH: You know the funny thing was is that everything sound-wise was so heightened because they built all these tunnels on the soundstage so sound really bounces around in there and even just when you’re walking through with all the water created so much noise that I think all of those things put us in the mindset of the situation. And I’m also pretty claustrophobic in real life so I was really ready to get out of the tunnel. That wasn’t acting!
BD: How long did that sequence take to shoot?
EH: I don’t really remember. I think it was maybe a couple of weeks. I know the main junction where the main fight happens took quite a bit of time but it’s hard to remember because we finished so long ago and it was such a long shoot because we shot both of the movies at the same time. It’s definitely my favorite sequence in the film.
BD: Yeah mine too. I don’t know if you’ve read the books but that’s the one sequence I was looking forward to the most in the series. It’s a great standout moment for your character and to fit so many characters into one movie, they definitely pulled off a standout moment for you.
EH: You know again it’s a credit to Francis. He’s so detail-oriented and I remember him pulling Wes [Chatham] and I aside and you start thinking about how we need to find these moments to connect so that when Wes does die it does feel as devastating as it does for Pollux. Francis is able to layer in a lot of things to help in the end product.
BD: Well I mean you get to do a lot more action in this as opposed to a less action-y role in Daredevil. Is there a big difference between working on something like this for a major studio and working on Daredevil for Netflix?
EH: Yes! There is a huge difference. You know Foggy talks a lot, so there were many days where I was thinking to myself “Hmmm…I wish I was back playing Pollux who’s not having to say anything and not having to get mic’d” and then you know the reverse was that playing the Foggy character it’s like “Man, I’m just so happy not to be running anymore.”
BD: That actually leads into my next question. Do you have more fun doing an action scene or do you prefer dialogue-driven scenes?
EH: It really just depends. I wish I could choose. The truth is I really love getting to do the action stuff. I rarely get to run around with a gun or look cool in black fatigues, you know what I mean? But then there is a part of me that loves getting into dialogue-driven scenes and thinking about how best to phrase something so it’s really telling the story. Dude I’ve been really lucky to play a lot of different types of roles.
BD: You’ve had a very wide variety of roles, going all the way back to The Mighty Ducks when you were younger. I think I first saw you in The Mighty when I was a kid.
EH: Oh cool!
BD: Yeah! It must be rewarding to play so many different characters, and also to have Hollywood want you for those type of roles because I imagine its easy to get typecast.
EH: Yeah honestly I feel lucky with every job that I get. This business is filled with really talented actors and I’m sure there’s a lot of guys out there who could have also brought something really special to the role I have played. I just feel lucky that I get a chance to do them. I just try to not disappoint or get fired. I just try to do justice to the scripts that are written
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2; image via Lionsgate
BD: Can you tell us anything about Season 2 of Daredevil?
EH: The truth is Jeph Loeb, who is the head of Marvel television, is holding my son hostage right now so I don’t say anything, but what I can tell you is that what Jon [Bernthal] is doing with the Punisher is really going to make people happy and we’re really stoked to have Elodie [Yung] playing Elektra. She is a really talented martial artist, and also gorgeous, so I’m really excited for people to get to see Season 2.
BD: Are you done filming the season?
EH: No, not yet.
BD: Do you have anything lined up after that?
EH: I don’t. Honestly as soon as we finish Daredevil I’m just looking to spending some time with my son because you know there’s a lot of days I go to work before he’s up and then I come home after he’s asleep so I’m just looking forward to going back to Los Angeles for Christmas and New Year’s.
BD: Well you’ve been very busy.
EH: Yeah it’s been crazy, man. You know on top of having a son it’s just that the last year or two of my life have been incredible. I’m just so grateful and happy, especially now that I have a kid, to be employed.
BD: I’m sure. So I’m going to backtrack for a second. You mentioned how you try not to get fired on your jobs, but have you ever been fired from an acting gig?
EH: I’ve never been fired from an acting job. I’ve tried to get fired–No I’m totally kidding. But I started acting so young so I know from a very young age how lucky I was, and especially to have a job that I loved. With each job I get I try my hardest to do it in a way that people will like and will also do justice to the script, but no I’ve never gotten fired.
BD: Last question: Is there a certain type of movie or genre that you haven’t done that you would like to try?
EH: I think it would be fun to play a young Ozzy Osbourne in a movie about the formation of Black Sabbath. How awesome would that be? [Henson tells his agent, who is sitting nearby, to write that down and make it happen]. But I would love to do a western!
BD: They’re making a comeback now with Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight and Kurt Russell’s new film Bone Tomahawk.
EH: Dude I can’t wait for The Hateful Eight. I cannot wait. I know people are talking about the things that Quentin said but he’s just that type of a person so I don’t think people should be surprised. In my opinion he’s one of the most talented filmmakers. I would die of happiness if I ever got a chance to work with him. I would be terrified and excited. I have so much respect for him that I would be afraid that I would let him down.
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 is in theaters everywhere today!
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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