In an interview with the cast of the upcoming western thriller The Thicket, we uncovered some of the things that inspired their performances — and the variety was pretty impressive. While Leslie Grace primarily focused on acting in the cold and snow, and Gbenga Akinnagbe looked back on his decades of watching classic westerns, Levon Hawke said that he blended his love of westerns with “a lot” of playing Red Dead Redemption 2 to get into the mood. And as an added bonus, there were snowy scenes in the game, too, allowing him to mentally multitask and zoom in on the look and feel of a cold and desolate Western setting.
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“I gotta say I did play a lot of Red Dead Redemption 2,” Hawke told ComicBook. “I was really just wandering through and they got a little snow going there, I started to get excited about what this was going to look like. I love Westerns, I grew up watching them. My father loves Westerns, even more than that, when I was about 10, showing me Westerns was really about our favorite family tradition.”
“I watched Hateful Eight,” Grace added. “I just watched a lot of not even westerns, but things shot in the snow. I wanted to see if I could tell if it affected the actors, and then found that out for ourselves later on. I got really psyched about getting to be part of a Western. I’d never had that experience before, so…really cool one.”
“I grew up watching them,” Akinnagbe said. “We’d watch the spaghetti Westerns on Channel 5 growing up. Clint Eastwood, all of them, John Wayne, and you go out and you play, as a kid, all these games as well. I think every actor, lowkey wants to be in a Western because it takes us right back to childhood, so to get an opportunity to do it was really dope, especially in these circumstances because it was such an off-kilter Western, still true to the genre, but really stretching it.”
Per the movie’s official synopsis, in The Thicket, “when fierce bounty hunter Reginald Jones (Peter Dinklage) is recruited by a desperate man to track down a ruthless killer known only as Cutthroat Bill (Juliette Lewis), he rallies a band of unlikely heroes including a grave-digging ex-slave and a street-smart woman-for-hire. Together they embark on a perilous quest to track down Cutthroat Bill that leads them into the deadly no-man’s-land known as…The Thicket.”
The Thicket will land in theaters on September 6th before traveling to Tubi for streaming.
