Love And Monsters: Dylan O’Brien Reveals Secrets of Bringing Giant Beasts to Life

Love and Monsters is a story which many young people are going to find themselves relating to given the world’s current scenario. Dylan O’Brien plays Joel, a character who lives underground and essentially avoids leaving his house out of fears of danger lurking for him outside. Now, fortunately for our world, there are no giant monsters waiting for us outside the door which are the product of nuclear waste from destroying an incoming meteor. However, for O’Brien’s character in the upcoming film, over-sized crabs and centipedes are waiting to chomp him to bits. On the set of Love and Monsters, bringing those creatures to love called for an extensive use of imagination by O’Brien and his co-star Jessica Henwick.

“They would they drag out this gigantic blow up crab that they ordered to have from China,” O’Brien of one sequence which pitted their characters against a crab which had to be about 20x the size it should’ve been. The full interview can be seen in the video above.

“It was like to take a reference sometimes, like it would obviously never be there when we were shooting, but it was hilarious that it even existed, but that whole set was real,” he explained. “Like they made that whole beach set so the environment was totally practical. I remember being on the beach and literally like mapping out like my fight with this crab or like where it would hit and how I would this whole like backing up sequence just all like making it up on the spot, okay like first it sweeps my legs and then I can roll over as it comes down like this and then I’ll scurry up and then it’ll knock over that house thing and like all just doing it to nothing, so much fun.”

Henwick revealed some more of the technical secrets, which were not unlike what she went through on the highly-anticipated Kong vs. Godzilla. “[The giant crab] was a tennis ball on a stick and then they would blow up crab that we had sometimes,” Henwick explained. “I actually didn’t interact that much with the monsters on Godzilla vs. Kong but my experience in that was similar in that it was a mixture of practical and CG.”

One of the animals which O’Brien’s Joel interacts with is a dog named Boy. The goodest boy in the movie was 100% real, as was O’Brien’s attachment to the dogs which played the part.

“You have like this dog around, two of them actually, there was two Hero and Dodge,” O’Brien explained. “It’s actually incredible how often I emotionally leaned on these dogs, like I would just go and roll on the ground so that whenever I was like tired or something and they would just lick my face. There’s also something like super incredible about how they’re not like allowed to, this is terrible because I loved this so much, but they’re not like allowed to like interact with anyone, but me. Most of the time unless it’s a day where they have to focus on interacting with another actor, then I have to like take the day staying away from them which was awful! There were days where like Ariana [Greenblatt] for a few hours could be the only one cuddling with the dogs and I was like, ‘I’m gonna kill her!’”

Love and Monsters hit on-demand services on October 16.