In the new horror-rom-com Your Monster, battling an illness and dumped by the love of her life, struggling actress Laura Franco (Melissa Barrera) returns to her childhood home to recover. To her horror, she discovers a monster living in her bedroom closet. Turns out he’s quite the charmer. Over time, they forge an unlikely connection as Monster (Tommy Dewey) helps Laura stand up to her narcissistic ex and fight for the lead role in his show that was promised to her. Laura and Monster’s relationship slowly grows into something more as she rediscovers her power and learns to unleash her long-suppressed rage.
As Your Monster releases in cinemas on November 28 before it’s VOD release on December 11, thanks to Rialto Distribution, Nick L’Barrow spoke with the film’s titular monster himself, Tommy Dewey, about how the prosthetics helped his performance, what being a monster taught him about humanity, and the potential future for Monster!
Nick: Tommy, thank you so much for taking the time to chat!
Tommy Dewey: Thank you for having me. I love talking about this movie.
Nick: I’m excited to talk about it with you. It’s so charming, and funny, and beautiful! However, I’d also like to quickly mention how great you are in Saturday Night. Michael got a lot of laughs out of myself and everyone at out screening. So, congratulations on both roles!
Tommy Dewey: [laughs] Thank you. I had a good month of October. I’m not going to complain. Talk about two very different roles and experiences! Both of them great. But thank you for the kind words.
Nick: Well, it’s my pleasure. But of course, I’m excited to chat all things Your Monster, and I’d love to start with one of my favourite scenes of the film, which is Monster and Laura [Melissa Barrera] watching Night of the Living Dead, and Monster is reacting to the film by suggesting the ways he would kill people better and what not. I love seeing people’s different reactions to horror, and I’m very much a person who loves when the characters do the ‘stupid’ thing because it leads to all the horror goodness. But it made me curious to find out what kind of horror watcher is Tommy Dewey.
Tommy Dewey: That’s a great question. I mean, I’m not like the biggest horror fan, which is one reason this movie was so fun to do. And to work with Melissa [Barerra], who is a modern scream queen. In many ways, this has been kind of a gateway experience for me.
I’m a fan of the dark, psychological stuff. I go to The Babadook, which is an Australian film! Talk about something that just lived under my skin once I saw it. That’s my kind of gear. I can laugh at the bigger, crazier stuff, and maybe that makes me a sicko! But I find that stuff funny and amusing. The stuff that really haunts me is more of the psychological stuff.
Nick: I love the introduction to Monster in this film. The casual delivery of ‘what’s up?’ does so much to set up your character and the tone of the film. What was your initial reaction to that introduction in the script? And how did your understanding of Monster evolve as you read the script?
Tommy Dewey: Yeah, there’s a short film of this concept that I did with Caroline [Lindy, writer and director], so our conversations about this character go a long way back. We met on a show called Casual that I did for years, and there’s really a lot of that low key subtlety and snarkiness from that show in my character, in particular.
And Caroline was a guest star on the show, and she spent a couple of days watching me. Then talk about a really “LA” thing, she ran into me at a yoga class, maybe a year later, and told me about this monster thing she had put together. And I was psyched from the get go, because I’d never gotten to do anything with the make up or prosthetics like this. I’ll just show up every day just for the fun of that.
Then I asked about what kind of monster she wanted me to be. And she said, ‘No, the mask is going to do that work for you. I want you to be snarky, and grumpy, and subversive, and funny.’ She’s just got such a sense of what genres are going to blend well together, and I think she thought my sense of humour, with a monster mask, was the cocktail she wanted. Thank God I trusted her, because I’m so happy with the results!
Nick: Experiencing something like this full face makeup and prosthetics for the first time, how conscious did you have to be of how your facial expressions and mannerisms are playing to camera? Does that affect your performance, if so?
Tommy Dewey: Great question. Dave Anderson’s got a couple of Oscars. Dave’s done Eddie Murphy’s work on The Nutty Professor, so I knew I was in good hands. They did all this 3D mapping so every bit of my mask matches up to the lines on my forehead, my crows feet, everything.
So, any kind of movement I do, that mask will do. So, again, it was a matter of trust. I messed around a bit in the mirror for a little bit and recognised very quickly realised that whatever I did played. Which was such a gift to the movie, because it’s there in plenty of those big moments, and all of those subtle, emotional moments too. It was a concern early on, but it quickly dissolved once I realised how good this mask was.
The only thing I would say, is that I didn’t consciously make bigger expressions. At the end of the week, it would kind of hit me on a Friday and I was heading into the weekend, but you would feel like you had been lifting weights every day with your face. There’s a fatigue that happens with it, and I’d be going all week just on adrenaline, and would recognise it. Then we’d go out for beers on a Friday night, and I’d be like, ‘My face is damn tired!’
Nick: With the makeup physically bringing out the literal monster within the character, I’m more curious to know what wearing that make up told you more about humanity, and being comfortable in your own skin? Especially as a performer…
Tommy Dewey: Oh, man, we’re going deep! I love it. Well, Melissa would tell you that once I got in all the Monster gear, I really started to feel myself, and my chest would puff out. And really, I didn’t notice I was doing that, but she rightfully pointed out this little strut I had, and that I stood a bit taller. So, it did something to me, very positive.
But I think the other big piece of it was, just on the level of performance, you just leave your vanity at home. I mean, if you look like Monster does, there’s no need to check yourself in the mirror. You look like hell! And so, you can just play the moments of each scene in a way that’s harder to do, frankly, than when you just show up on set and bring your own feelings about what you look like to work. So, that was very cool and freeing.
And then, I had an interesting experience when we shot some exterior scenes that were in a park, that you might remember. It’s a really big, emotional scene. So, the Super Bowl, which is huge in America, had just finished, and people were pouring out of bars and walking by wondering what Melissa Barrera, their favourite horror actress, is doing with this gnarly looking dude, wearing a suit, in a park? The whole thing was a trip!
But I want to say this – one of the reasons I really wanted to do this is because it’s such a personal story for Caroline. For her, it was a story about falling in love with her own rage, coming out of a very trying and personal experience. And that concept – I’m so far from your question right now! – but I do want to note that when you can hitch your wagon to such a talented person telling such a personal story, you do it.
Nick: That leads into my next question perfectly, because fiction and movies have played such a pivotal role in my life, as an audience member, in helping me understand things about myself, or events in my life. And a movie like Your Monster, being such a personal story for Caroline, will also speak to people in that way too. How has fiction played a role in your life, whether it’s a movie you’ve watched, or a character you’ve played, that’s helped you understand more about yourself?
Tommy Dewey: It was Roget Ebert, I think, who called cinema “the empathy machine”. I love transporting to different worlds. But, I also grew up in the American South, where we can have a stiff upper lip. It’s kind of, ‘Suck it up, and get on with it.’ And there is value in that. But I really think watching movies, and sort of living vicariously through them and their characters, allowed me to experience everything from grief, to the kind of joy that brings tears.
I would go to the movies to have those emotional experiences. And I see you nodding, my guess is that you’ve had those same experiences. So does everyone. Even the most repressed person, you know, can be caught crying in a movie theatre. And I mean, I’m really nerding out now, but I really believe that movies in that way—I think I just love a good romance! Like the romance at the centre of this movie! We could all use the occasional reminder of what love can be, right? It’s such a delight to take that ride.
Nick: I love that. We’re getting close to our time here, so I’ll close out with one more question. You mentioned earlier that you’ve worked on TV shows before, which obviously, is an extended format where you get to spend more time playing characters. If you had the chance to play Monster over the course of a TV show, what aspect of that character would you like to explore the most?
Tommy Dewey: God, man, these questions are so good! I loved doing this movie so much, but we shot this movie in 21 days. It was run and gun. And I would 100% love to be in Monster’s skin a little but longer.
I mean, I don’t want to spoil anything… Monster’s world is Laura in this movie, right? He is almost exclusively with Laura. Most of his scenes are in that house. Everything else aside, I would love to see Monster out in the world a little bit more, interacting with other people. That’s something I think he could give us.
Nick: Like a week-to-week serial adventures of Moster in different cities of America?
Tommy Dewey: That would be hilarious, right? Just how he comes up against and deals with different types of people.
Nick: I’m sure whoever is watching this interview from the studio is writing down some notes now!
Tommy Dewey: We’ve recorded this, so it’s legally binding [laughs]!
Thank you so much to Tommy for taking the time to chat, and to Rialto Distribution and Ned Co PR for organising the interview. Your Monster is playing in Australian cinemas from November 28, and will be available of digital from December 11.
