Interviews
‘Prey’: Meet Dane DiLiegro, the Latest Actor to Play the Iconic Predator [Interview]
Director Dan Trachtenberg described his Predator movie, Prey, as a “David and Goliath story” in a recent featurette. It’s an apt description, and not solely because it refers to the first Predator hunt on Earth, 300 years ago. It’s also because the Predator itself is a bit of a giant.
Actor Dane DiLiegro towers over Prey star Amber Midthunder at 6’8″. And that’s before you factor in the fully mechanized Predator head that sits atop DiLiegro’s own head.
Bloody Disgusting spoke with the actor to discuss what it was like to play the much more feral iteration of the iconic horror character, the extensive training it required, and more.
For starters, how did DiLiegro find his way into the role?
“Our dear friend Alec Gillis over at ADI messaged me on Instagram and had me come in for the design pitch for a project they’re doing in Canada is what he told me,” he explains. “I walk in, and there’s the Predator costume on the table with this gray, 3D printed iteration of what a Predator’s head looks like. I’m like, ‘This is Predator. This is Predator. Oh my God.’
“Dan, our director came in. Then Marty Ewing, our producer, and Jeff Cutter, our director of photography. They came into the studio, and I put this Predator suit on. Alec told me he wanted me to deliver a balletic svelteness to this character. They were making a bit of a departure from the traditional Predator. Balletic svelteness, Hmm. Okay. I’m thinking a panther, something feline, smoother, that’s very in tune with the forest. Feral was another word thrown around, primal, something very instinctual and very in tune with nature. He could run through trees naturally because he’s done it a million times, and he’s one with the woods and the forest. I tried to incorporate all those feelings and emotions; fast forward to me running around studio ADI, turning corners, jumping up on tables, doing little shifty things, and running through the parking lot.”
That svelteness factored into more than just movement for the actor.
“I had to lose 25 pounds to play this character. They wanted a lean, dynamic, more animal Predator. You know you look at a feral cat; feral cats are not very plump. Traditionally I’m bigger, more muscular. I had to get away from that.“
In addition to slimming down, DiLiegro dedicated himself to training for the physically demanding part.
Photo Credit: Dane DiLiegro via Twitter
“I trained for two months parkour. I’m 6′ 9″; not many 6′ 9” guys do parkour. I had to learn the basics of that. I trained in martial arts for two months. I trained my neck. I teamed up with a company called Iron Neck and strengthened my neck for two months because the Predator’s head sits on top of my head, and it’s a lot of weight on the neck. It was about 13 pounds or something. On top of all the acting, I did all the stunts and the motion capture.”
Luckily, playing the film’s Predator didn’t require hours in the makeup chair. DiLiegro revealed that the process for transforming into the Feral character was more streamlined.
“One body suit, with sleeves up to my neck and down to my ankles. In the beginning, the suit was a little bit tighter. We had six suits and four heads; in the beginning, it was tight foam latex. The more you wear it, the more you use it, the more you sweat in it, it starts to loosen up; get looser, nicer, easier to get in. So, you slide into the suit, get zipped up, hike it on your shoulders, put it on, and then put on the gloves, put on the feet, and then you’re ready to go to set. When you go to set, they set up the shot, and it’s time to shoot.
“We would call it predification, ‘Can we predify Dane?’ They put the head on, and there’s a series of zips and snaps, and that was it. Maybe they would put a little glue on my back to keep the back flush, but that streamlined the process. We got it down by the end of the shoot. Like it was so quick.”
DiLiegro also detailed how his head sat in the suit’s neck, with the mechanized Predator head atop, adding complicated layers to filming.
Dane DiLiegro with artist Mike Fields. Photo credit: Dane DiLiegro via Instagram
“The visibility was minimal. My head’s in the neck. For this Predator to look forward, I had to look down at the ground, and there were two holes in the neck that I could look through. I couldn’t see more than three feet in front of me. Alec Gillis will kill me for using this word because he’s like, ‘I didn’t create a torture device.’ It wasn’t a torture device, but I was essentially blind. I couldn’t see the people in front of me, but it was an interesting challenge. We had to lay sticks on the ground for me to follow along.
“Our first AD, Rich Cowan, would be in my ear with a speaker, and he would cue me on when to do certain things, like, ‘go, walk forward, shield and shield up.’ Now, the trappers are out here. I’m looking at the ground the whole time and ‘lower your shield, and then turn and walk.’ Everything, whatever it was. It was difficult to hear anything. Because one ear is blocked and there’s a lot of motors. There are 30 servos in the head of this character. So, you can hear all the motors moving for the mandibles.“
The physically demanding role requiring precision and multitasking with a limited scope of vision meant a lot of sweat for the actor. In turn, it added even more weight to the suit.
He explains, “I mean, three months up there in Canada. We went through it all. We’d start at about 70 pounds at the beginning of the day. And foam latex just absorbs. It’s a sponge because it’s foam. So, the sweat doesn’t go anywhere. It just fills up the suit, and the suit gets heavier and heavier and heavier and heavier. I’d go down to crouch, and sweat would shoot out of my knees. You can see in some of the production stills, if I’m swinging during a fight scene, you can see the sweat just shooting out of my sleeve of this character.”
DiLiegro shared a fight scene that ultimately didn’t make the film, much to his relief.
“There was a tree chase scene in the script; I saw it pre-vis. It eventually got cut; I’m not sure why. But we were going to be running on tree branches and jumping from branch to branch, me chasing [Amber Midthunder]. They ultimately removed that from principal photography. But I was very concerned because it would’ve been interesting to run on tree branches with the head on and wires and everything.”
While the actor is now pursuing more human characters in addition to his creature work, horror remains at the top of his list. When asked about any monsters he’d love to play post-Predator, DiLiegro didn’t hesitate to share his dream role.
‘When I moved to Los Angeles when I was hooked on only doing monsters, it was being a Predator and being Jason Voorhees. Jason Voorhees ties back even further into my childhood. I was him about four times for Halloween. That character is fascinating to me because he’s a big supernatural child, and his movements are minimalist and effective. I mean, just tilting your head a centimeter to the right tells a completely different story of this character, and being granted the challenge to create and tell a story through Jason’s eyes to the audience, non-verbally, would be so much fun. He’s huge. He’s menacing. He doesn’t give a shit. He wants to avenge his mom.
DiLiegro adds, “I have no idea how I would go about even being considered for a role like that, but to have that opportunity, would be astounding and an honor as well.”
Photo Credit: Mike Fields via Instagram
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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