(Inmates includeMiles Teller,Jurnee Smollett,and a terrifying Nathan Jones.)
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Your character, Steve Abnesti, seemed to be having so much fun.
What drew you to this role?
Chris Hemsworth in ‘Spiderhead’.Netflix
And that’s part of his quest in the movie.
Did that genre-bouncing attract you to it?
It did, definitely.
Netflix
So tell me more about Steve.
He’s a bit different from other characters you played in the past.
What unlocked that character for you?
Chris Hemsworth as Abnesti, Miles Teller as Jeff and Mark Paguio as Verlaine in ‘Spiderhead’.Netflix
I wanted to embody an immaturity almost, or a stunted growth with the character.
And anytime I thought it was conventional, I wanted to try and do something different.
This character didn’t get to where he was running this massive company just on his intellectual skills.
And so he’s quite a skillful chess player of the game of life.
We see him navigate it all in his favor.
He really is playing God in this penitentiary.
And you know he believes the means justify the end.
You know, you gotta break a couple of eggs to make an omelet.
[Laughs] Which can be fairly tragic in this setting.
The movie plays with tone a lot, and one way it does is with the choice of music.
A lot of yacht rock, which I enjoyed.
Did you have any input into the music selection?
I love the soundtrack too, I think it was incredible.
So it’s quite unsettling.
Spiderhead didn’t look much like a prison to me.
It looked like a high-end health spa.
[Laughs] Yeah, that was the intention.
It was sort of the Google workplace of the prison world.
To lure in with a false sense of trust and comfort.
It’s all about manipulation.
It is sort of a chess match.
How was it working with Joseph Kosinski?
What kind of director is he?
Amazing, hugely collaborative.
I had about three or four weeks in an impossibly short window to shoot this film.
And we boarded the story in such a way that I was just back-to-back every day with these scenes.
Normally I’d learn the scene as they occur a few days before.
It was a very calming set.
You know, a lot of directors work off the idea that chaos somehow is beneficial.
It drums up an energy or so on.
But [theSpiderheadset] was a very calm, friendly space.
One last question: Was that really you flying that little plane in the movie?
I was, yeah, I was.
We went out and landed on the water as well, and took off and it was pretty incredible.
I can’t say I’m the Tom Cruise-level of pilot.
[Laughs] But I gave it a go and it was really fun.
