IFC Midnight(NEW YORK) — As most actors do, Devon Sawa physically prepared and trained for his role as a rugged trapper and outdoorsman for his new thriller, Hunter Hunter.
“We tried to learn as quickly as possible how to be authentic as possible, and then and then just did the whole acting thing to look as if…this is second nature,” he tells ABC Audio.
However, while the Nikita vet expected having to handle the tools of the trapping trade, one aspect of his character was a real commitment. “You know, the the skinning, the traps, even the smoking — I had to look like I had I was an old school smoker…and boy, was that a thing!” says the actor.
Sawa, who’d only smoked briefly in his late teens, recalls with a laugh, “Well, the director told me…’You smoke in this film.’ I’m like, ‘Oh ok.’ He goes ‘No, you smoke in this film…These guys that live out there…they they put one out and they put one in…”
Sawa says director Shawn Linden asked if he wanted milder clove cigarettes, but the actor refused — perhaps without thinking it through. “We’d be doing a take, I’d be like on take four, I’d be like, (gasping) ‘OK, ok…’ Like cigarette eight. Cigarette nine,” Sawa laughed.
In the movie, his character Joe stalks a rogue wolf, but soon discovers there’s a different danger closer to his remote cabin, which he shares with his wife and daughter, the latter played by newcomer Summer H. Howell.
A former child star himself, Sawa says Howell has the goods. “I’m pretty good at telling who wants to be there and who doesn’t because that’s where I came from…On set, there’s always two types of kids: the kids who want to be there and the kids whose parents wanted them to be there,” he says.
Of Howell, he says, “She was asking me constantly what films she needed to watch, and…you could tell that she she really wanted to be there. And it shows. She’s she’s a phenomenal young actor.”
Hunter Hunter is now streaming.
By Stephen Iervolino
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