Dan Stevens on the Blockbuster Summer He’s About to Have, With ‘Godzilla,’ a Vampire Film, and ‘Cuckoo’
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At long last, Dan Stevens can take his kids to see one of his movies.
“There’s a fair amount of my work that they haven’t seen yet and may never see hopefully,” the English actor says, over Zoom on a recent morning from his home in L.A. “But this is definitely one that they can enjoy.”
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The film, “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire,” is the first in a trio of films the actor has out this year (and definitely the only kid-friendly one). After the blockbuster release comes “Abigail,” a vampire horror movie costarring Melissa Berrera and Kathryn Newton, and later this summer “Cuckoo,” alongside Hunter Schafer.
“I like to be busy,” Stevens says. “I’m very, very lucky that I’m able to be so busy.”
His longtime friend Rebecca Hall, who is in the first “Godzilla x Kong” film from Adam Wingard, originally suggested Stevens for the part of Trapper after reading the script. Little did she know that Wingard and writer Simon Barrett, who had worked with Stevens in cult favorite “The Guest,” had written the party with him in mind.
“Honestly, it was that I’ve been friends with Wingard for about 10 years now since we did ‘The Guest,’ and we’ve talked about various different projects that we might do again together, some big, some small,” Stevens says.
Hall, meanwhile, has “always been a bit like my big sister, kind of keeping me in check and giving me advice and equal measure.” That plus getting to bring his kids to the Australian wilderness for months made it a no-brainer.
“With any film, frankly, getting to go on location is always an adventure. Going somewhere new, meeting new people, I always love finding out what it is about the place, talking to the local crew, finding out where I should go,” Stevens says.
“Cuckoo” was shot first of the three projects, in Germany, and was of immediate interest once Stevens learned it was the second film from “Luz” director Tilman Singer.
“I watched his first feature, which was essentially his graduation film, which he made for no money at all, but is so inventively disturbing that it really kind of made me sit up and think,” he says of “Luz.” “There’s certain films where I see them, I don’t know anything about them, and immediately afterwards, I want to know exactly who made this film and what’s going on in their head. There are certain filmmakers where you’re like, ‘I don’t really care what they’re doing next. I want to be in it.’ So I very, very quickly got on with Tilman.”
With “Cuckoo” and “Abigail,” as well as past work like “The Guest,” Stevens has continued to prove himself to American audiences as someone much more wide-ranging than his “Downton Abbey” character, Matthew Crawley.
“I think there’s a particular kind of thing that gets made in England, and generally speaking, you are put in one of those boxes. I’d done quite a lot of period drama by the time ‘Downton’ came out, it just happened that that was one that became very, very popular around the world. So it wasn’t so much ‘Downton’ per se, but I was just looking to do different things than just costume drama all the time,” he says. “That was one of the things that excited me about the industry over here [in the U.S.] was the preparedness to see you try different things in different roles. I think there’s perhaps a bit more of a conservative attitude in Britain to casting, which is unfortunate because we have such amazing actors. I’ve just been eternally excited since moving here, really, by the appetite to see that variety and champion that appetite for variety.”
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