The Hunt’s Betty Gilpin on Loving the Intense, Violent Production

The Hunt finally hits theaters this weekend, having been delayed from a late 2019 release when its trailers were met with debate over the controversial messages it might send. Such a conversation has only propelled interest in the R-rated film which certainly delivers on its R-rating, offering up violent sequences while making a mockery of many of the extreme arguments seen in Internet comment sections. The captain of the ship is Betty Gilpin, playing a character by the name of Crystal who fights her way through an awful scenario of being hunted by other humans with a lesser sense of humanity. This means she was surrounded by other characters who are violently less fortunate along the way.

For Gilpin, not only was the production different because of the quick rate of turnover within the cast, but also because of the empowering opportunity it gave her as a woman in film. “Usually, it’s the boy that gets to be there the whole time, developing chemistry with the people who come on for a couple days in the movie so it was fun to be that person,” Gilpin told ComicBook.com in an interview seen in the video above. “As you know, I didn’t do a ton of working with a lot of the people in the movie ’cause I never got the chance to meet them. We had a cast dinner but we didn’t overlap a ton.”

When Gilpin did get an opportunity to spend some time in front of the camera with her co-stars, such as Don actor Wayne Duvall and Gary actor Ethan Suplee, she had a blast with them. “The people I did have scenes with, I fell in actor love with them, each and every one,” Gilpin said, discussing a role which culminated in an intense sequence opposite Hilary Swank. “It made me realize that I had judgments about their characters that I didn’t know I had ’cause when I met them and saw how they were playing, like Gary and Don, I was like, ‘Oh, I love Gary and I love Don,’ and when I had read it, I’m like, ‘Well, I know who this person is.’ Then I realized this movie is for me just as much as it is for everyone has.”

Damon Lindelof, one of several writers on The Hunt who is arguably best known for his work on LOST and recently knocked HBO’s Watchmen out of the park, also opened up about how the film tackled so many topics amidst the chaos which it hurled Gilpin into.

“I think genre movies, and this one is no exception, are always about some sort of degree of wish fulfillment and also a degree of be careful what you wish for,” Lindelof explained. “I think that for anyone who’s ever been trolled, and that’s pretty much anybody, you don’t have to be doing my job in order to get trolled these days, you just have to have a Twitter account. I think, first off, there’s a sense of, this person doesn’t really know me, and then second, you have this fantasy of, I wouldn’t mind trying to hunt that person down and killing them. So more than anything, I think that this movie has been cast in a certain light of being about political ideologies but it’s really about trolling is bad. I think we can agree.”

The Hunt is now playing in theaters.