Interview: Drew Starkey and Dan Stevens on ‘Onslaught’
Few films this year wear their influences as proudly, or as strangely, as Onslaught. Marking Adam Wingard‘s return to his genre roots after exploring the Monsterverse with Godzilla vs. Kong and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, the A24 action-thriller reunites the director with longtime writing partner Simon Barrett for a fun, freaky and ferocious siege movie steeped in the DNA of Halloween, The Fog and The Terminator. And while the film is anchored by a fearless central performance from Adria Arjona, it’s the gallery of oddballs orbiting her that gives Onslaught its gonzo midnight-movie charge, chief among them the characters played by Drew Starkey and Dan Stevens.
Set over one terrifying day in the barren New Mexico desert, Onslaught follows Celeste (Adria Arjona), a single mother and former Army sniper grappling with PTSD, whose remote trailer-park community finds itself in the crosshairs when three genetically engineered super-soldiers escape containment from a nearby secret government compound. The rogue experiments are the twisted brainchildren of Hans Kammler (Dan Stevens), an aging Nazi scientist contracted by the U.S. government, while Cyrus (Drew Starkey), a mysterious, perpetually altered “janitor” hired to clean up the outbreak, drifts through the carnage like someone conjured by the Illuminati.
Beneath the pulpy spectacle, Onslaught is a film about the strange, violent machinery humming underneath American life: conspiracy culture, occult symbolism and the military-industrial complex. Both actors leaned all the way into that weirdness.
For Starkey, fresh off his acclaimed turn opposite Daniel Craig in Luca Guadagnino‘s Queer, Cyrus marked a chance to disappear into one of the year’s most genuinely inexplicable characters. Though Cyrus appears in brief, enigmatic bursts throughout the film, Starkey reveals that he and Wingard built out a rich history for him that lives just beneath the surface.
“Adam and I had a lot of conversations about his backstory,” Starkey recalls. “We talked a lot about the occult, and I read a lot of books, a lot of Crowley books, that informed who he was and why he got in the position he was in. Adam does a great job of giving you this laundry list of material to chew on. So even though you see him in these brief moments, all of that is playing underneath the surface in some way.”
That underneath-the-surface strangeness extends to Cyrus’s unforgettable look: an eccentric collision of hair, fashion and attitude that Wingard has described as an almost-alien human being built on contradiction. Starkey confirms the design was a true team effort, one he pushed to increasingly extreme places.
“I came in with some ideas, this kind of look from punk occult culture,” he explains. “We had an amazing hair department that helped craft that. I really was set on shaving my eyebrows for it.” The eyebrows, however, survived. Barely. “I’d already brought it up in the hair and makeup trailer, like, let’s just shave them off. And Adam was like, ‘Let’s slow down a second. What if we just bleach them?’ And I was like, that sounds great,” he laughs. “We just kept pitching ideas to Adam and he was super collaborative and super open, like, ‘Yeah, that’s awesome, let’s take it further.’ It was a total collaborative effort.”
Stevens, meanwhile, is no stranger to Wingard’s sandbox. Onslaught marks the pair’s third collaboration, following the cult classic The Guest and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, and for an actor who has played everything from a military super-soldier to a Marvel superhero, a robot and Charles Dickens, the pull remains the same: the director himself.
For Stevens, the calculus of choosing a role like Kammler ultimately comes down to trust. “It really is wanting to work with Adam, knowing that you’re in safe hands, knowing that you can take big swings with a juicy character like that, and being in such great company as well,” he says. “It was a no-brainer, really.”
Onslaught is now playing in theaters.