Actors and stuntmen Nick Castle and James Jude Courtney, who pull double duty as 61-year-old masked killer Michael Myers in the upcoming Halloween, say the Shape will be just as ruthless as he was 40 years earlier in John Carpenter’s 1978 original.
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Castle, 70, who first played the mute murderer in the original Halloween, reprises the role now shared with Courtney.
“He has a stunt background, so he’s doing a lot of the physical work on the show,” Castle told HalloweenMovies. “I’m coming down to bless the set, and to do a couple of shots here and there.”
“I learned how to kill from a mafia hitman who lived with me when he got out of prison,” Courtney said of his approach to the elusive serial killer.
“I was writing his life story, so he went to see the movie I did: it was called The Hit List. It wasn’t a big movie or anything, and when we walked out he was like, ‘Jimmy, it was a really nice movie but that’s not how you kill people.’ I’ve been complimented many times here on set on how efficiently I kill, and all I did was take what he taught me.”
“Why [producer Malek Akkad] and [director David Gordon Green] brought me in, is because it’s just the way I move. It’s a place that exists [and] my job was to find that place,” Courtney added.
“It’s a living, breathing place so when I go into that place everything is natural. I just do what that space dictates, which was created by Nick and John [Carpenter] and Debra [Hill], and [which] has lived and breathed all these years.”
Halloween ignores 40 years of franchise history, doing away with all but the 1978 film. In this new continuity, Michael Myers has been imprisoned in a sanitarium for the past four decades — and his captivity has only made him stronger.
“Michael Myers is carrying the space for the shadow that most human beings are afraid to look at,” Courtney explained.
“Most human beings are afraid to look at the fact that there’s a killer inside them, that there is someone capable of heinous acts. For me, when we were [shooting] in the mental institution before Myers broke out, all I focused on was his energy that’s been building and festering and expanding, and I just held that space from again what Nick had created, and I just let it grow and grow because Myers has become more powerful. He’s defying death. He’s defying any type of restrictive condition so to me, from my perspective, what Nick created has just gotten stronger.”
Despite his advanced age, the 61-year-old Michael Myers will be just as near-unstoppable as he was when he first menaced Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) in 1978.
“He’s a bad motherf—, man,” Courtney said.
“He’s a bad dude. I’ve got to tell you, even old fighters don’t lose their punches. I got in the ring with Joe Brown on the set of Far and Away, who was Rocky Marciano’s sparring partner for seven of his eight title fights, and he said, ‘C’mon Jim, you can throw better than that,’ and I threw hard at him, man. And that old man’s [punches] kicked like a mule, and that’s when he sat me down and said, ‘A fighter never loses his punch.’ I think it’s the same with Myers. He’s not going to lose his strength, his virility, his power and his focus. He’s taking the hits.”
In keeping with the original — of which this latest Halloween is a direct sequel to — Myers will be hard to put down, but not superhuman.
“In that he can take a lot of punishment, they keep it pretty real,” Castle said. “I have seen some of the sequels where they suggested other worldly reasons for his power, but this one does not have that.”
Halloween, starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Judy Greer, and Andi Matichak, opens October 19.
