The Walking Dead’s Tom Payne Discusses New Mindgamers Movie

Hitting theaters for one night only this Tuesday is a film experience called Mindgamers.

Mindgamers follows a set of students at a quantum academy attempting to create a collective consciousness, only to discover they are part of a grander experiment. While the film will take the cinematic liberties of exaggerating science into fiction, its concept is based in reality, having worked closely with several scientists to truly grasp the neurological concepts. It stars The Walking Dead‘s Tom Payne and Jurassic Park’s Sam Neill, along with Melia Kreling, Antonia Campbell-Hughes, and Oliver Stark.

In Mindgamers, Payne plays a character by the name of Jaxon. Between the footage shown at the private Mindgamers event at Red Bull HQ last week and the trailers released online, it can be difficult to pin point Jaxon’s characteristics and goals.

“I can say that Jaxon is a wildly ambitious scientist who doesn’t necessarily take into account everyone else’s feelings and thoughts like he has to do,” Payne said. It’s quite a contrast by comparison to the role most fans will recognize him for: Paul “Jesus” Rovia on AMC’s zombie drama.

“The similarities that [Jaxon and Jesus] have is they’re both kind of loaners who are used to working on their own time frame and doing what it is they want to do,” Payne siad. “Jesus has a lot more empathy and thoughtfulness and thinks more about how the group can work for everyone. Whereas Jaxon is very quite tunnel vision and is working hard to further scientific discoveries and stuff but is using people in a more manipulative way and using them to further his own glory.”

Fans will have a chance to see Payne’s beard-free look in Mindgamers when it hits 600 theaters nationwide for one day only on Tuesday, March 28. During the screenings, the minds of moviegoers in New York and Los Angeles will be connected to a cloud which will pool their experience watching the film.

While this live event takes place, 1,000 people from the movie theater audience will participate in the experiment by wearing a cognition headband. These headbands will enable scientists to capture the cognition state of the participants simultaneously via cloud technology and collect data in real time. The result will be a world-first image of a mass-mind state (the likes and scale of which has never been attempted), which could drive our research into the nature of human cognition for years to come.

“We wanted to delve into a world which is going to happen,” Mindgamers director Andrew Goth said. “These sort of connective aspects started growing so we decided to keep that theme and the connectivity of what it would be like if we, as humans, start to connect more with the Web, with the Cloud. What does that mean for us? Where does that mean we’re going to go next? Where does the ego end.”

For more information about Mindgamers‘ neurological experiment experience in New York City and Los Angeles, head to mindgamersmovie.com/#/join.