KILLING IT WITH COMEDY
Sharlto Copley’s latest film pushes the action-genre envelope with martial arts, stunts and humour galore. By
One of the most charming things (and there are many) about meeting Joburg-born and internationally famous actor, director and producer Sharlto Copley in person is his abiding South African accent, even though he’s lived partly in Los Angeles for more than a decade.
Copley was recently in Cape Town to promote the film Boy Kills World, directed by Moritz Mohr and starring Bill Skarsgård as the titular “Boy”, a rather absurd action character who vows revenge after his family is murdered by Hilda Van Der Koy (Famke Janssen), the deranged matriarch of a corrupt postapocalyptic dynasty that left Boy orphaned, deaf and voiceless.
Driven by an inner voice co-opted from his favourite childhood video game, Boy trains with a mysterious shaman to become an instrument of death and is set loose on the eve of the annual culling of dissidents orchestrated by the ruthless Van Der Koys.
Bedlam ensues as Boy commits bloody martial arts mayhem, inciting an orgy of carnage and bloodletting. As he tries to get his bearings in this delirious realm, Boy soon falls in with a desperate resistance group, all the while bickering with the apparent ghost of his rebellious little sister.
Copley plays Glen, the husband of one of the Van Der Koy sisters Melanie, played by Michelle Dockery, who starred in Downton Abbey as the icy and imperious Lady Mary Crawley. Glen is a television presenter who presides over the annual Van Der Koy culling event.
“Glen is the public face of the Van Der Koy family,” says Copley, who came to prominence in the indie sci-fi hit District 9.
“He’s on all the posters. He’s just not as good at his job as he probably should be.”
The marriage between Melanie and Glen is primarily a matter of convenience, according to Dockery. “He is the ringmaster, and the public loves him,” she says. “He’s important to her — at least in a business sense.”
Copley says his first thought on reading Boy Kills World was how a film this ambitious and inventive could possibly be made within such a tight production schedule.
“I liked the character, and I responded to the short, but this is really edgy stuff,” he says. “It was a ballsy thing to do.”
He and Brett Gelman (Stranger Things and Fleabag), who plays Gideon, the lone male Van Der Koy sibling who longs to be an acclaimed writer instead of the ineffectual brother of a murderous despot, developed a rapport on set that allowed for improvised dialogue.
“The two of us had a tremendous amount of fun. In some of the larger scenes, it felt like performing for a live audience. Throwing in something that surprises everyone is one of my favourite things to do.”
Copley recently made an appearance in the final season of Curb Your Enthusiasm with Larry David, in which he improvised with the famous comedian. “I’ve become [someone] who’s known for doing that since District 9, most of which was improvised. Often directors and producers bring me in, like in Monkey Man [a recently released film in which Copley acted alongside Dev Patel], where Dev said, ‘Just go nuts. Be the guy who runs these underground fight clubs and announces the fights.’
“I love doing riffing off the script — the most artistic way to act is to be in the flow of the character.” But, he adds, “You can’t just riff about anything. It helps that I’m a writer and write scripts. You learn to improvise around particular ‘beats’.”
He makes mention of his stint on Curb Your Enthusiasm: “That was one of the best experiences of my life. I wish I could do more comedy. I’ve been watching that show since before all the crazy things happened in my life, in the days before District 9. I love comedy.”
There’s a strong comedic line that runs through Boy Kills World to balance the action and the violence. “I’m not a huge fan of violent movies,” says Copley. “But this film is done in a tongue-in-cheek, videogamey way that doesn’t take itself seriously. The fighting is all set pieces that are choreographed. It’s all completely ridiculous.”
Boy Kills World takes the martial artsaction genre to a new level, according to producer Sam Raimi.
“What sets this film apart is a combination of Moritz’s brilliant, insane camera work and action/fight designer Dawid Szatarski’s beautifully choreographed, wildly imagined fights,” he says. “It is amazing to watch.”
Yayan Ruhian, who plays the Shaman, is one of the world’s foremost practitioners of the Indonesian fighting form Pencak Silat.
To get into the character of Glen, Copley says he didn’t have to do too much work.
“I relied on my early influences, my experience of growing up watching Dwight Schultz, who was in the original A-Team TV show. I brought in Eddie Murphy, Robin Williams, Jim Carey — those types of performances that were just fun. There’ sa lot of playfulness in this film. It doesn’t take itself seriously, and I resonated with that.”
The film was made by Nthibah Pictures, the US and SA production and finance company founded by venture capitalist Wayne Fitzjohn. Studio executive Simon Swart joined the project and pulled the production together.
With Nthibah’s local and international production capabilities, they created a dystopian world in the middle of Cape Town, one of the busiest cities in South Africa. “The location was one of the reasons I wanted to do the film,” says Copley. “The other was that it was produced and funded by a South African company — at this [high] budget level, which I hadn’t come across before. There was Hollywood-level money invested by these two local guys.”
Swart describes the film as fresh, audacious and aggressive.
“We were trying to push the creative envelope with action, stunts and humour. We knew that if we could execute it right, it would be one of the coolest movies ever shot in South Africa,” he says. “Our goal is to make content that’ll work worldwide. This movie is perfect for an international audience in terms of story and casting. It’s not like anything we’ve done before, but then it’s not like anything anyone has done before.”
There’s a lot of playfulness in this film. It doesn’t take itself seriously, and I resonated with that
SHARLTO COPLEY Actor
Boy Kills World is on circuit.