Channel Plex: The Method

(the following clip is an excerpt from the Behind the Scenes documentary to be included on the upcoming digital release of The Passion of the Cube 2: Max Cube Must Die. Simon responds to a question on the press tour about being the second actor to play the titular hero…) 

"Well, I did a lot of the obvious things to prepare for the role… Spent some time on the firing range, got some instruction from a guy who’s pretty much a real life version of the character Frank. And I took some martial arts classes from another really great guy named Dave Wright. I meditated, and read a lot about the Tarot and other occult ideas. Did a few pagan rituals, which were very… moving, really. I even had lessons in piloting a helicopter – I figured Max would know how to do that, even though it doesn’t happen in either movie… 

"The really neat stuff though, the stuff that got me most in touch with what I think Max was about… It was when we started filming, and, well I had heard all the rumours about Suki as a director, that she tried strange stuff with her casts, to get these really interesting performances out of them – like Kiera had told me that on Passion 1, Suki had her and Jason volunteer on a help line during pre-production… So Suki gave me a cell phone and would have people call me on it at, like, well any time, at all these weird times, sometimes even during shooting… I think some of them were PAs, and some were even buddies of hers… And they would have these assignments for me, these little sorta missions… Once I had to leave set and go to a local café to pick up an envelope and deliver it to a hot dog vendor – I have no idea if he was in on it or not. And there would be a lot of late night calls, one AM, three AM. So I’m routinely getting out of bed – actually by that point I was sleeping on the couch in my clothes, like the clothes from wardrobe… So yeah, it got intense… Really, say like in the scene in the LEGACY parking garage, when Max trips and starts to cry and he’s fumbling to try and reload his guns… Well, there wasn’t a lot of acting happening there… So hopefully that all comes across in the film, and everyone enjoys it."