Dan Stevens and Drew Starkey show their darker instincts in Onslaught, the latest movie by Adam Wingard, led by Adria Arjona. Both actors became household names by playing gorgeous sexy men on popular television series, Stevens as Downton Abbey's Matthew Crawley and Starkey as Outer Banks' Rafe Cameron.
In Onslaught, neither is interested in repeating himself.
The two actors are not among the genetically engineered super-soldiers that turn the New Mexico desert into a very bloody nightmare. But their characters are essential to the wild, scary and unexpected universe Wingard expands around Celeste, Arjona's former army sniper, as she tries to keep her daughter alive after a military experiment goes spectacularly wrong.
I say "expands" because Wingard himself has said that Onslaught lives in the reality of The Guest, his 2014 cult thriller starring Stevens. It is not a sequel, but it is very much family. A very disturbing family, obviously.
This time, Stevens is not the super-soldier. He is Dr. Hans Kammler, the scientist connected to the project that has created the killing machines. The role gives the British actor another chance to disappear behind an extreme physical transformation, including platinum eyebrows, a cloud-white haircut, a dead eye, and enough creepy energy to make a room feel unsafe.
In a conversation with this reporter, Stevens said Wingard had been feeding him material long before cameras rolled.
"We have been exploring this idea for years," he said. "With a lot of help from Adam Wingard, he really gets to, you know, he'll put you in the mindset. He gives you movies to watch, books to read, music to listen to."
That music was not just background noise. Stevens said Wingard gave him a playlist early in the process that included German covers of Rolling Stones songs, DAF and, yes, ABBA.
"There was even like an ABBA song, I think, was in there," Stevens said. Because what is a crazy scientist with Nazi roots without a little Swedish pop?
Starkey, meanwhile, plays Cyrus, a government cleaner sent to deal with the mess left behind by Kammler's experiment. He is not cleaning floors. He is cleaning up a superhuman disaster, which is another way of saying that he arrives when everyone else's day has already gone very, very wrong.
The actor found his way into Cyrus through music too, but his soundtrack is less disco and more high-octane dread.
"The song that's playing during my character introduction, I listened to that a lot," Starkey told this reporter. "And then a lot of house music and kind of hardcore music. I listened to a lot of Aphex Twin and Death Grips. A lot of very high-octane material, for sure."
It makes sense. Cyrus has the unnerving stillness of someone who has seen terrible things and knows where to put the bodies. Starkey does not make him a conventional villain or a clean-cut action hero. He is something much more fun to watch: a man who seems to understand the rules of this bizarre world a little too well.
Both actors came to the movie carrying very different kinds of fan affection. Stevens was the beautiful, doomed romantic hero of Downton Abbey before moving through monsters, musicals, Legion, Beauty and the Beast, Godzilla x Kong, and The Guest. Starkey has one of the internet's most intense fan bases thanks to Outer Banks, but his work in Luca Guadagnino's Queer made it clear that he has no intention of remaining inside Rafe Cameron's shadow.
Arjona, though, is the heart and engine of Onslaught. The Latina star carries the movie from beginning to end, mixing violence, chaos and tenderness as only a former sniper and mother of an 8-year-old girl can. It is her story, even when Wingard fills the screen with masked killers, government conspiracies, exploding bodies and enough blood to make John Carpenter proud.
The cast around her is part of the fun. Alex Pereira plays The Butcher, one of the super-soldiers hunting Celeste and her daughter, while Rebecca Hall steps into the strange, sexually charged world of Hanna Kammler. The ensemble also includes Michael Biehn, Eric Wareheim, Reginald VelJohnson, Maurice Greene, Jacob Scipio and Blake Kennedy.
There is horror, there is action and there is very dark humor. But Stevens said the movie's ideas have roots in real history, especially the longstanding fascination with secret military experimentation and the belief that the public only knows a fraction of what has happened behind closed doors.
"A lot of the lore and the theory behind this is based in reality," Stevens said. "There have been throughout the 20th century and well into the 21st century nefarious experiments of this sort. I think we only know a tiny fraction of what's really been going on."
For narrative purposes, he added, Onslaught takes "a little kernel of an idea" and runs with it.
Stevens will next trade one sort of augmented human for another. He has been cast as Alex Murphy, the title character in Prime Video's upcoming RoboCop series, a role that will put him inside one of science fiction's most iconic suits. Starkey's post-Outer Banks run continues with Sean Durkin's A24 romance Deep Cuts, opposite Cailee Spaeny, as well as Jeff Nichols' Southern Gothic supernatural horror King Snake, with Margaret Qualley and Michael Shannon.
Before any of that, though, they are competing for the attention of their very different fan armies. When told that people were already waiting to see who would inspire more edits and more dramatic reactions online, Starkey and Stevens had the only possible answer.
"We're in competition," one of them said.
Of course they are.
