Two of our biggest movie stars face off in Netflix’s newest hit movie, Apex, which features a grieving thrill seeker (Charlize Theron) caught in a game of cat and mouse with a serial killer (Taron Egerton) in the Australian outback. Speaking with ComicBook in a new interview, Egerton confirmed that not once did he and Theron commiserate about playing serial killers (Theron having won her Oscar for playing serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster), but that he got advice about playing such a role from a totally different Oscar-winner. To find out more, though, we have to issue a Spoiler Warning for Apex.
One of the twists of Apex is that not only is Taron Egerton’s Ben is not only hunting people for sport, but he’s also eating them too. Egerton confirmed to us that even though he didn’t talk to Charlize Theron about playing a serial killer (“Apparently, I wasn’t good enough,” she joked), he did reach out to his fellow Welsh actor, Anthony Hopkins, who also won an Academy Award for playing a serial killer, the fellow cannibal, Hannibal Lecter, in The Silence of the Lambs. “I did ask the advice of Anthony Hopkins,” Egerton revealed. “And he had great advice, but the one little piece that I really clung to was, he said, don’t play the evil. Don’t play evil.”
Egerton and Theron went on to further discuss how much the character of Ben evolved after he was hired for the role, with his co-star calling the version in the script and the version in the final film as being “day and night” different. Furthermore, they actively tried to avoid playing into all the expectations of serial killers in movies because of its prevalance as a subject matter.
“I don’t think we (talked about serial killers),” Theron added. “It was definitely not on the forefront of the conversations that we had. I just think Taron is such a great actor, and I knew that he would bring something to it that was missing in the script. There was great potential there, and I think the whole time we made this movie, really, what we wanted was to just break every trope that we could about what a serial killer would look like in these movies. So any time the rewrites would go towards this, ‘Well, let’s explain why he’s doing all of this. Let’s talk about his family,’ we were just so allergic to that. We really wanted him to be this enigma.”
Egerton noted that, even though Ben’s backstory isn’t fully explored, he brought a childlike quality to him more so out of his own instincts than any particular insight into serial killers.
“It’s always that I bring a childlike quality,” Egerton said with a laugh. “I think it felt like the path to me, of the direction that the character should take… I suppose the original character on the page was probably more like the guy Ben wishes he was, and I think the dimension of him indulging in a bit of wish fulfillment and trying to perform this guy, this man of the woods for Charlize’s character Sasha, that felt like an interesting route to me.”
