Tom Blyth and David Jonsson are getting used to blockbuster film sets after starring roles in recent Hunger Games and Alien franchise spin-offs – but a low-budget production like gruelling prison thriller Wasteman is where they feel like they thrive the most.
“I’m a big believer that boundaries give us creative freedom”, Blyth told Zavvi. “This film taught me more than any I’ve done so far that I’d rather have no modern comforts or the bells and whistles which come from a blockbuster film set”.
“When you’ve got great material and great collaborators, then I’d much rather take the discomfort. It leaves you going home every day feeling like you’ve used yourself to the fullest surrounded by people you love, which is the best feeling.”
Shot in just 18 days in a now-disused prison, the film follows Jonsson’s Taylor in the final week of his decade-long sentence, where years of putting his head down are jeopardised by the arrival of new cellmate Dee (Blyth). A violent drug dealer with big plans to dominate the criminal underworld from behind bars, his sudden appearance threatens to pull Taylor into a world he’s spent the best part of his sentence keeping himself at a distance from.
The two actors share an agent and had been fans of each other’s work from a distance. Although Jonsson says he was looking for a project to do with Blyth, Wasteman happened “in the right way”, arriving at the same time he was hunting for material.
Jonsson explained to Zavvi: “We've become good mates, and I respect his work very deeply, but I don’t think this film would have got made if it wasn’t for the trust that we managed to build up with each other when we got to set. This is an unglamourous film which we shot with basically no budget, so you and your collaborators all have to want it; there are no perks in making it, apart from the act of making something bigger than yourself.
“Restraints became our biggest strength. On set at the time, everybody naturally complained that they wanted things that were out of budget, but looking back, you can see that the movie improved through finding new ways to work around those.
“For example, a lot of the scenes take place in the cell, and itt was not an easy task to film Tom there, as his performance relies on him finding new ways to be disruptive in this tiny box. He has to bounce off the wall, and our director of photography Lorenzo Levrini, bless him, had to keep finding new ways to shoot him with the constraints of the real-life prison set in mind.
“Now, the movie is even more claustrophobic and intense than it was to begin with, which I’m very proud to be a part of.”
Jonsson’s performance is physical in a different way; his character is still battling a drug addiction behind bars, so he had to lose a significant amount of weight to do him justice. The physicality he brings to the performance makes him appear frail and vulnerable regardless of the surroundings, in stark contrast with the fired-up, rage case dealer who moves into the bed bunk below.
“When I first read the script, the character was written to be older; he was a guy who made a mistake when he was younger, and was struggling with a deep form of addiction as a way of coping with it. For me, I thought it’d be more interesting if he was even younger, was locked up when he was very young, and had a child on the outside he hadn’t seen grow up – it made it more urgent to me.
“To get the audience to buy into it, you’ve just got to live it, so I lost a lot of weight. I’ve lost track of how much, but it was between 20 and 30 pounds, as he’s not only suffering from an addiction that strips you, but he’s been in there for so long – his body is not in the same way that other young people of the same age would be.
“He’s someone that I wanted to look old in the same way a lot of young people do because they’ve just gone too hard on the drink and drugs too early. I’m glad that aspect of his physicality really came across for you, because it wasn’t fun at all to bring that to life!”
Blyth did a bit of bulking up before the cameras rolled, but his biggest challenge wasn’t physical so much as mental: how do you get an audience to see the humanity in a character you wouldn’t want them to entirely empathise with?
“It’s funny, because I think Cal (McMau, director) in his interpretation of Hunter Andrews and Eoin Doran’s script, saw Dee as beyond Machiavellian – he sees him as a true beast, a bit of a demon”, Blyth laughed. “But my thing is that he has to have humanity, because if he’s just antagonistic the whole way through, it quickly reaches a plateau, and you won’t invest in this relationship between the two of them.
“And it is above all else a relationship between two men stuck in a cell together, which means that it would be hard to get the audience to care if the shared humanity between them wasn’t there. It was a challenge to get him to be antagonising and demonic enough whilst still giving you the space to care about his story and where he ends up.
“I’m always interested in the villains who have that glimmer of humanity – you could call him an anti-hero, but I think that’s being a little too nice to him, he has to be a villain for this story to work! The perspective I’m interested in is that a lot of people we consider villains go home to their families at night and cook dinner for their kids, even if they’re doing evil stuff in the daytime.
“I’m more interested in the stories which offer the complicated full picture of a villain’s life, and not just the evil stuff they’re getting up to. There’s a reason their families always see them as heroes, despite everything!”
