As Chris Hemsworth described it, making Spiderhead was like working on a piece of theater. The project was made in a short period of time with only a small handful of closed sets and heavily focused on how the characters drive the story forward. Key to pulling something like that off? Cast range and chemistry, and Hemsworth and Miles Teller certainly have both.
The film gets its name from the Spiderhead facility, a state-of-the-art penitentiary run by Hemsworth’s Steve Abnesti, a genius mogul testing mind-altering drugs. Folks like Teller’s Jeff are inmates at Spiderhead and while they are afforded far more freedom and amenities than they'd get in a standard prison, they’re only able to have all of that if they agree to have a drug-administering device surgically implanted on their back so that Abnesti can run experiments on them.
An especially vital element of Spiderhead is Hemsworth’s ability to show off great range in the role. He needs to convey Abnesti’s brilliance and give him a level of charm that encourages trust, but he also ensures you always feel the darkness bubbling under the highly manipulative and rather cruel tactics he uses to get the data required. Yes, we all love Hemsworth as Thor, but with every non-MCU project he adds to his filmography, it becomes more and more undeniable that Hemsworth’s range is limitless, and that’s something Teller was able to feel while working with him on Spiderhead. Here’s how he put it:
“He’s really just a gamer. I think that the more stuff outside of Thor that he does and people are able to see, I think they’ll really start to speak about him as just a great actor, not as Thor, superhero, any of that stuff. And those parts are really hard to do. Having dabbled in it a little bit with all the green screen, that’s really tough and I think Chris is just, he can do whatever he wants, man. There’s not a single performance that he’s not capable of, and he absolutely raised my game.”
As for his own personal work, Teller experienced a rather one-of-a-kind challenge on Spiderhead. In most films and shows, a highly emotional beat comes with a build, a chain of events that lead a character to feel a certain way. However, that’s often not the case in Spiderhead. In this film, an emotion is sparked by a mere push of a button. What was it like tackling material like that? Here’s what Teller said:
“It was tough, and when I was reading the script, there were certain scenes [that] I was really nervous about doing because, like you said, it’s not coming up organically. There’s nothing that’s leading you to that emotion or anything, so that stuff was tough. But I guess it’s kind of like theater too, when you’re doing a scene and you’re staring out into the audience and you’re projecting a house or your daughter or whatever it is, and they exist out in a blank space. I kinda had to utilize some of that for this.”
If you watch Collider Ladies Night, you know we often play a filmmaking “would you rather” game, and there’s one particular scene in Spiderhead that called for one of those questions. At one point in the film, Jeff is given a dose of G-46, a drug dubbed Laffodil that, well, makes you laugh. While the scene does look like a good deal of fun, delivering an authentic belly laugh does seem as though it could be harder to do than it looks, so I asked Teller, would he rather have to fake laugh in a scene or fake cry in a scene? Here’s what he went with:
“I think the laughing only because it always starts as a fake laugh and then it ends up turning into a real laugh because the theater of the absurd kicks in and you just start kind of cracking up. Fake crying, oh my god, I hope I never become a victim of that. But look, sometimes you feel it and then other times you don’t and that’s called acting.”
Looking for more from Teller on Spiderhead? You can find just that in our full video interview at the top of this article!