Love and Monsters Star Michael Rooker Breaks Down His Clyde Role

Love and Monsters is a hit. The film shifted to an on demand release and people are loving it. It's not based on a book, a comic, or an pre-existing IP. It's a totally original film starring Dylan O'Brien, Jessica Henwick, Michael Rooker, and Ariana Greenblatt. It's a fun story about surviving in the outside world after an effort to stop a meteor from slamming into the planet lead to nuclear waste prompting animals to grow multiple times larger than their normal size. There are those that survive in bunkers and those that survive above ground. For Rooker's Clyde, it's the above ground life.

"First off, he was a survivor and he would survive above ground," Rooker tells ComicBook.com of his Love and Monsters character who is a ton of fun to watch. "That in itself has all the difficulties of, well, you surviving. You're not hiding away from the monsters. You're fighting them. You're trying to hide sometimes, but sometimes you have to fight them. And that's probably him and most of the people, most of the group. His group he was with, have all perished because of that of cause."

Rooker's Clyde is good friends with another surface dweller in the form of Greenblatt's Minnow. [Clyde and Minnow] are probably the only remaining two from their original group," Rooker explains. "Now we're on our own. We're just traveling and trying to find a safe place to live, you know? And in the film, you know, we are on our way toward a mountainous region where the monsters really don't like the cold, so they don't venture up that way. So maybe we'll be safe up there for a while."

Having plenty of post-apocalyptic experience thanks to his tenure as Merle Dixon on The Walking Dead, Rooker contends Love and Monsters is not about the end of the world. Quite the opposite, actually. "It's not the end of the world. It's the beginning of the world. This is a new beginning for the world, you know?" he says. "Monsters are all about replenishing and redoing the world, you know? What the humans have, Dylan's character, Joel is like just the first to come out. Maybe he's the first ever to come out of his hiding place, you know? So there's bunker and I think other people came out."

The cast, whose chemistry shines on screen as they have fun inhabiting this brave new world together, clicked immediately upon their arrival at the Australia production of Love and Monsters. "We didn't have to build [chemistry] at all man," Rooker says. "It was already there. It was there honest to goodness before I even, even before I first read it was there, you know? We hooked up like you couldn't believe it. It was like the three of us went into the read and we're already bickering back and forth, and having fun and joking about one another. I mean, it was already, it was just already there."

Have you watched Love and Monsters yet? What did you think? Share your thoughts in the comment section or send them my way on Instagram!

Love and Monsters is available now on demand.