Jai Courtney unnerves as Captain Tucker, a serial killer who ritualistically feeds his prey to sharks in director Sean Byrne‘s Dangerous Animals. The intimidating villain meets his match in Hassie Harrison‘s Zephyr, a tenacious survivor worthy of final girl status.
Dangerous Animals swims into theaters on June 6, 2025, unleashing a twisted battle of wits between predator and prey.
It’s Zephyr’s loner status that puts her in Tucker’s crosshairs, but the killer underestimates just how much fight is in his latest target. For Harrison, a “Yellowstone” actor used to playing characters with grit, Dangerous Animals presented a physical challenge. That’s not just because of the grueling physicality that Tucker’s brand of horror demands but also due to the amount of time Harrison would spend in the ocean when filming in Gold Coast, Australia.
Oh, and it happened to be winter.
“It was very cold,” Harrison tells Bloody Disgusting of the water’s temps during the shoot. “I think that was actually one of the more challenging aspects of filming this. I loved our whole team, our crew, and my director; everyone was so amazing, but that cold. But it was manageable. We did about two and a half weeks of night shoots outside in the winter, being in the ocean at four in the morning, and then there was that cold snap that hit. That’s just one of those things that people always glamorize about being an actor, but it’s also a lot of hard work and being out in the elements. Sean very rightly wanted this to feel authentic, and he was like, ‘There’s a siltiness in the water that you just can’t replicate in those tanks and stuff.’ Harrison was at least able to use it as fuel for her character. “I barely had to even act.”
The stakes are high, making the push and pull between Tucker and Zephyr an exhilarating psychological battle of life and death. Harrison more than holds her own against Courtney’s big swings and describes how she found that rhythm with her scene partner. “Of course, we’ll do different takes of the same scene, and there are different elements, and that is the dance we do as actors and seeing where people go with it. But I think one of the important things to me is, because he is so big and that character is so large, having something that felt really dropped in for Zephyr, you know what I mean? I’ve had other characters that are bigger, but Sean helped me with references and backstory. She’s a woman of few words. She’s real shy deep down inside, and she just masks so much pain with a tough exterior.”
That tough exterior is tough. Zephyr is willing to go farther than most to evade Tucker’s death grip, yielding more than a few cheers or sympathy pain from audiences. There’s one pivotal moment in particular, of which we won’t spoil, but suffice to say that it’s a moment that earned collective gasps and squeals from the audience at its Texas premiere.
Harrison explains Zephyr’s mindset at that moment. “We filmed that scene, the very last scene of the whole movie, at the end of a couple month long shoot, and I think it’s one of those things, too, where she realizes it’s actually, it’s not just about her. It becomes feral, and it becomes just survival.”
Hassie Harrison and Jai Courtney in Sean Byrne’s DANGEROUS ANIMALS. Courtesy of Independent Film Company and Shudder. An Independent Film Company and Shudder Release
“Watching that on the big screen for the first time, and I’ve seen it a couple of times now and heard people cheer. The first time, I just started crying. It was just so meaningful, and I was nervous about filming that scene. That’s one of those things; it’s hard to pull from real-life experience on that, and I feel like it, through Sean’s masterful directing and editing, is now my favorite scene in the movie.”
So, what did she draw from when pulling off this shocking, vital scene? “Look, I don’t know how to say this without… I mean, emotionally, there is that last chance at not dying. There are these levels, of course, emotionally, that get someone to that point, but someone told me that it’s the equivalent of chomping on a carrot, and you have to have that same force and also that same ease. So I just thought about that.”
The post ‘Dangerous Animals’ Star Hassie Harrison on Ocean Challenges and Surviving a Killer [Interview] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.
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