Bad times at the el royale

BAD TIMES AT THE EL ROYALE I an all-star cast checks in to the hotel from hell…

Check in for an exclusive look at Drew Goddard’s cult-in-the-making thriller.

The less you know about this film, the more fun you’re going to have,” announces Drew Goddard, writer/director of Bad Times At The El Royale. It’s a worrying gambit given Teasers now has to ask Goddard ‘fun’-sapping questions for the next 30 minutes. “However, we really want to tell audiences that this is worth their time. Because these days, you really have to be something special to get people to come to the movies.”

“Something special” encapsulates Goddard’s career to date. In the six years since ingenious horror The Cabin In The Woods, Goddard has kept busy, developing the first season of Daredevil, directing buzzy sitcom The Good Place, earning a Best Screenplay nom for The Martian and signing on for Deadpool team-up sequel X-Force. But before the fourth-wall-smashing mayhem begins, there’s Bad Times, a twisty, twisted crime thriller set in 1969 about seven strangers who check in to the titular Lake Tahoe hotel with no guarantee they’ll check out.

“It started from a place of loving film noir and crime fiction,” says Goddard, who held regular screenings of “noir-adjacent” films with Cloverfield collaborator Matt Reeves for inspiration. Dreaming up that barnstormer of a title before writing the (spec) script, Goddard half-jokingly admits, “I had to figure out how to write a story that was worthy of that title!” First job: populating the Royale with a marvellously monikered ensemble, including Laramie Seymour Sullivan (Jon Hamm), a slimy vacuum

cleaner salesman; Father Daniel Flynn (Jeff Bridges), a priest who moonlights as a bank robber, as seen in our exclusive pic; Darlene Sweet (Cynthia Erivo), a singer in the wrong place at the wrong time; and Billy Lee (Chris Hemsworth), a charismatic cult leader who seemingly spends the film shirtless. “I kept putting the shirt on him, but I turned my back and the next thing you know, it’s off,” Goddard guffaws. “I can’t blame him.”

Having worked with a pre-Thor Hemsworth on Cabin, Goddard had the God of Thunder in mind for the wild card character from the off, teasing that Lee “is a departure from what you’re used to seeing on screen”. The same could be said for the film, where nothing is what it seems. “You don’t want to be audacious for the sake of it,” he explains. “But if there’s a turn that may not be conventional but it excites me, I learnt to trust that instinct and follow where that will take you.” In Goddard we trust.

ETA | 12 OCTOBER / BAD TIMES AT THE EL ROYALE OPENS LATER THIS YEAR.