Sarunas Jackson on How The Cast Made Gatlopp’s Insane Premise Work

Gatlopp, a recently-released horror-comedy from writer-star Jim Mahoney, centers on a drinking game that springs to life, threatening the players with an eternity stuck around the table together. Think Jumanji, if instead of the jungle it was reality-bending threats from Hell. Sarunas Jackson, better known for more grounded roles in projects like Insecure and Made For Love, says he jumped at the opportunity to take on something as wild and weird as “Drunk Jumanji from Hell,” but he also credits the dynamic they were able to build among the four main players (Jackson, Mahoney, Jon Bass, and Emmy Raver-Lampman) with making the hilariously high stakes feel like something that was real and relatable.

The film was one of the first productions to get back underway following the hiatus at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and they had a bit of an advantage in terms of most of the film being four people in an enclosed space together, and two of them — Jackson and Bass — had just come off filming something together immediately preceding the hiatus and had good chemistry.

“In that room, where our [COVID] bubble was, we did a lot of the work in there,” Jackson recently told ComicBook.com. “There was a lot of talking, there was a lot of joking. When you’re spending so much many hours in this one space in the same clothes, it honestly feels like you were there longer than you were, to the point where it feels like we all did go to college together for real. We have all experienced that. We have close friends growing up, life takes you different places, you move somewhere else. You’re not seeing each other as much, this is different. You can pull from that, so we just used that to make it feel as present as possible and tried to make it feel as real as we can.”

The actor also praised Mahoney’s flexibility. After all, when you write and star in a movie, it’s easy to feel a profound sense of ownership in it, and be reluctant to change a word. But Jackson says Mahoney humored the many, many improvisational flourishes that his castmates wanted to sprinkle in.

“Jim — he’s agreat writer and he was so collaborative,” Jackson said. “I don’t care how nice he is and what he says, but he had to get annoyed at some point, because we were always coming to him with ideas, but he was so lovely and collaborative.He threw his ego out the window. When you write something, you have a vision, but he just kept saying, ‘No, to me, that makes it better.’ That made the chemistry even better, and we all leaned on each other and supported each other.”

Gatlopp is now available to buy or rent from streaming apps like Vudu, iTunes, and Prime Video.