first got the film cancelled before eventually pushing the release date back from September of last year to March of this year.
Thankfully, the film is finally seeing the light of day on March 13, so that the world can witness a brilliant performance from Betty Gilpin. The Glow star showed that she has more than wrestling tricks up her sleeve, and those skills come in handy when her character Crystal is being hunted down the whole movie by Athena's (Hilary Swank) group.
The star and one of The Hunt's writers, Damon Lindelof (Watchmen), sat down with Screen Rant to discuss their response to the ongoing controversy and Gilpin's own love of playing "unhinged women."
Congratulations on The Hunt, you guys. I had so much fun watching last night. I was really surprised by the reaction to it when it was first announced, because I thought that couldn't possibly be how people were taking it. How did you take the reaction?
Damon Lindelof: Well, it was very surreal for us, because obviously the movie that we made is not what sort of prompted the reaction. I think that this idea of... It's a movie about being misunderstood, about going to extremes, about somebody making a joke and it gets out of control. And suddenly these things were starting to happen in the real world.
All we ever wanted was for people to be talking about the movie itself versus what they thought that the movie. And I for one - even having gone through the experience that we've gone through on this movie - just trust people to make up their minds for themselves. If anything, the idea that the culture, whether it's Twitter or the news or whatever, is telling everybody what to think about something before they've even seen it - that was the most frustrating thing for me.
Because I think people are intelligent; people are sophisticated. They'll decide whether or not they want to see the movie first and foremost, but then once they see it, they get to determine whether or not the movie is controversial. And I've yet to come across a single person who saw it who thinks that the movie is dangerous or controversial or unnecessarily provocative. They either enjoy it or they don't enjoy it. Most everybody enjoys it, and this movie is a fun movie; a fun, entertaining movie. And she's amazing in it.
Yes, you are. You are amazing as Crystal, and I know you're also going to be Ann Coulter in American Crime Story: Impeachment. Why do you think you like digging into characters whose views are so different from yours? Reaching across the aisle, if you will.
Betty Gilpin: Yeah, I like to play unhinged women. What else are we here for? I am one of them, personally.
Yeah, I'm really excited to, you know - and my wrestling character in glow is Liberty Belle, the all-American hero. I think that all these characters are very different from each other, but I think that a lot of them feel like they were built for Greek stakes in a vocal fry kitchen sink world. And the outlets that they find to implement those Greek stakes are sometimes successful and sometimes not, be it a wrestling ring or Fox News.
Now without spoiling specifically, I love where the movie ended up for certain people in this room. Can you imagine yourself doing sequels if enough people watch it and think, "This actually was great"?
Damon Lindelof: Well, I don't know. Does Jason Blum do sequels? I'm joking. There's literally, like, Insidious 9.
Yeah. I mean, Nick and I have certainly fantasized about the idea. I think that to do The Hunt 2 and just say, "Ooh, now there's a bigger hunt." That's not interesting to us. But the movie is really about conspiracy theories and what people will believe, and asks the question, "Is there any conspiracy theory that's so ridiculous that no one would believe it?" And that feels to me like it's a very fertile space for storytelling.
And so the idea of having more conversations about what people believe versus what is actually true - we hear things in the world and go, "That can't be true," and it turns out to be true - I think that would make for a very interesting potential sequel.
The Hunt arrives in theaters on March 13.
