Edgar Wright Shot Glen Powell Naked in Most Expensive Film

Glen Powell, bare aside from a towel, dangles from a rope eight tales in the air in below-freezing Bulgaria as director Edgar Wright watches from the floor in a parka, sipping an espresso.

It’s February, and so they’re sprinting towards the end of manufacturing on “The Running Man,” the longest, most costly and by far coldest shoot of Wright’s profession. Days earlier, a blizzard hit the nation, blanketing it in snow. Powell, who stars as a game-show contestant in a race to remain alive in Wright’s adaptation of Stephen King’s dystopian novel, had been monitoring the frigid climate carefully, all too conscious of this upcoming scene. In it, his character evades lethal hunters by leaping out a lodge window and then rappelling down the facet of a constructing while sporting barely a sew.

“It’s always temporary pain for eternal cinematic glory,” Powell jokes.

Wright, who constructed a cult following with quirky, genre-bending movies — like “Hot Fuzz” and “Baby Driver” — that play like Tarantino on laughing gasoline, is meticulous about choreographing action sequences and obsessive about getting the good shot. His lens is tight on Powell, who hangs by a harness for half-hour while the digital camera resets. Wright, 51, needs to pay homage to the endurance assessments Bruce Willis suffered by means of in “Die Hard” by taking John McClane’s barefoot skyscraper antics to the next level — and with fewer garments.

If Bulgaria sounds arctic, it was nothing in contrast with Scotland, the place “The Running Man” also shot. “I think I lost circulation in my leg,” Wright says. “I had so many layers on, but it was the insidious cold of Glasgow. I wasn’t sure I’d ever get warm again.”

Eight months later, Wright is enjoyable in New York City on an unseasonably heat fall day. It’s 5 weeks before Paramount-distributed “The Running Man” opens on Nov. 14. Wright has just completed signing autographs and taking selfies with a whole lot of New York Comic-Con followers who rushed the stage at the end of a panel about the film. Comic-Con is pure costumed chaos, full of cosplayers resembling the throngs of zombies in Wright’s “Shaun of the Dead.” That’s going down upstairs. Wright is secluded from the mayhem in a quiet dressing room that can only be accessed by way of a labyrinth of tunnels — it’s fortified with sufficient pastries and bottled water to outlive this nerd-pocalypse.

King wrote the 1982 action-adventure lengthy before social media took over the world and, in an ironic twist, set his send-up of actuality tradition and totalitarianism in 2025. What as soon as appeared like a darkish and distant fantasy now has eerie parallels with our tumultuous current. For Wright, the movie is an opportunity to place his distinctive spin on a story that was tailored right into a testosterone-soaked 1987 thriller starring Arnold Schwarzenegger at the peak of his He-Man period.

Wright’s version is about in a hellscape the place the most fashionable present in America is “The Running Man,” a contest that provides $1 billion to any contestant who can survive a 30-day countrywide manhunt. There’s no prize for second place — only a grisly dying. It’s a nightmarish premise that Wright grounds in humanity while still delivering his bravura action set-pieces. Part of the change comes from how the protagonist, Ben Richards, is portrayed. Instead of Schwarzenegger’s steroidal killing machine, Powell’s character is a hardscrabble father, so determined to earn cash for his sick child that he dangers his personal life.

“We were shooting in the elements all night,” Powell says. “Edgar wanted it to feel brutal.” Before signing up for the project, Powell assured Wright that he was prepared for something the filmmaker threw at him. “I said, ‘There’s not going to be an actor who works as hard for you as I will,’” Powell recollects. “‘I’ll put my body on the line to make sure you get the movie you want to get.”

Wright, who grew up in southern England, the son of two artists, first read King in his teenagers, sharing paperback copies of “Night Shift,” “Salem’s Lot” and “It” along with his brother, Oscar. To this day, he’s held on to his King assortment, with its cracked spines and dog-eared pages.

“It was a formative experience reading King, because it was my first time reading grown-up material,” he says. “It’s more than horror; there’s attitude, world-building and humor.”

In 2017, Wright tweeted that if he might remake any film, it might be “The Running Man.” Eight years later, he received his probability, however he doesn’t view his version as a remake of Paul Michael Glaser’s movie; it hews nearer to King’s darkish novel.

“That movie is its own thing,” Wright explains. “This is a new adaptation. ‘A Fistful of Dollars’ is an amazing reinterpretation of ‘Yojimbo.’ David Cronenberg’s ‘The Fly’ is a wildly different take on the ’50s film. It’s a fun thing because there’s two movies from the same source that are wildly different.”

“Wildly different” describes a variety of Wright’s work since he burst on the scene with 2004’s “Shaun of the Dead,” a buddy comedy set during a George Romero-esque zombie outbreak. Stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost turned two of Wright’s closest associates, and the three went on to make two more cult favorites together — “Hot Fuzz” and “The World’s End.” Those films despatched up buddy-cop movies and alien-invasion flicks by the use of a distinctly British perspective (there have been loads of droll asides to associate with the action scenes). Wright shortly developed a fan base among a bunch of American pop culture-obsessed auteurs.

“Peter Jackson, Quentin Tarantino and Sam Raimi saw themselves in Edgar,” Pegg says. “He was encyclopedic about film. That appealed to their own heritage.”

As Wright’s stature rose, he turned entrusted with greater budgets from major studios. But his unorthodox sensibility didn’t always align with that of the leisure trade. “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” an bold video game-inspired romantic comedy, earned raves, however its particular effects-heavy sequences despatched its price ticket hovering to just about $90 million. Audiences failed to point out up, and the movie grossed a measly $51.7 million.

But Wright suffered an even more devastating setback, spending eight years growing an “Ant-Man” film for Marvel, only to see the project collapse after his bespoke imaginative and prescient did not jibe with Disney’s cookie-cutter superhero method. He needed to do one thing outrageous, however after “The Avengers” turned a box workplace juggernaut, the studio opted to play it protected.

“The idea of doing it at the time excited me, because you want to put your own spin on it,” he says. “But between pitching the idea and doing it, the whole franchise had blown up. There was a house style. The thing that attracted me about it had gone away.”

“Baby Driver,” a 2017 sleeper hit about a socially awkward getaway driver, helped Wright regain his stride. The Sony Pictures release earned $227 million and proved Wright might retain his fashion while working within a studio’s constraints. But he stumbled with “Last Night in Soho,” an homage to Swinging London and Polanski-esque horror movies that had the misfortune of debuting in 2021, during the pandemic.

“It was a bummer promoting that movie because it was all Zoom,” Wright says. “The pandemic was not a good time for anybody at all, and no good for cinemas either.”

“The Running Man” marks Wright’s grand return to theaters along with his most crowd-pleasing film in years. Still, though King is a model unto himself and Powell’s star is on the rise, with its $110 million price range “The Running Man” isn’t a positive factor. It arrives as many R-rated actionheavy films geared toward adults — even those with big stars like Leonardo DiCaprio (“One Battle After Another”) or Robert Pattinson (“Mickey 17”) — are floundering at the box workplace. Not to say that the movie depicts fractured politics. Will audiences purchase tickets for a film set in a dystopia that mirrors their very own?

“We’re as close as can be to ‘Running Man’ without people actually dying,” Wright says. “I don’t even want to predict when things will take a darker turn. I hope never.”

Much of Hollywood is freaking out that AI is coming for his or her jobs. It’s a topic that is entrance and heart in “The Running Man,” which examines how the technology can be utilized to control public opinion. Days before Wright took the stage at Comic-Con, the trade erupted over news that Tilly Norwood, an AI “actress,” had brokers wanting her as a consumer. Her creators envision her as the next Scarlett Johansson.

“Obviously, AI is here to stay,” Wright says. “There’s no putting the toothpaste back in the tube. But when you see that Tilly Norwood thing, who’s gonna get excited about an actress that doesn’t exist?”

Bouncing his leg excitedly as he talks, Wright still hasn’t come down from the high of his “Running Man” panel and is full of vitality despite having lately deplaned from a London red-eye. Being in New York has made him suppose again to his firstever Comic-Con in 2004, when he was selling “Shaun of the Dead” with Pegg. “We could walk around with nobody having any idea who we were,” Wright says.

Now, Wright has just headlined a panel full of 3,000 followers. He’s clearly an icon to his fellow movie geeks. The secret to Wright’s success is that deep down he’s still just a fan. That morning, Wright reached out to King and, in the most “polite and British” manner, made positive he might inform the crowd that the creator favored his tackle “The Running Man.”

“Like it? I love it!” King emailed again. “It’s faithful enough to the book to keep the fans happy, but different enough to make it exciting for me.” And as Wright reads the message, a smile breaks across his face.

“I’ll take that,” he says.