You may know him as Hercules, Emmett Cullen, or even Tarzan, but recently actor Kellan Lutz has been bringing other memorable characters to life in a string of intriguingly imaginative movies. After playing Sy Lombrok in the ambitious sci-fi film The Osiris Child, Lutz channels his inner Indiana Jones for the spider-centric 7 Guardians of the Tomb. With the adventure horror movie out now in theaters and on VOD and Digital HD platforms via Gravitas Ventures, we recently caught up with Lutz to discuss reteaming with Kelsey Grammer after working together on The Expendables 3, experiencing spider pranks on set, and his dislike of cockroaches.
Like your character in 7 Guardians of the Tomb, I'm not exactly fond of spiders, so I could relate to a lot in this movie. I found it intriguing that you were playing this Indiana Jones-type character with a haunted past. When you first got the script, what attracted you to playing Jack Ridley?
Kellan Lutz: I remember [director] Kimble Rendall talking about this movie about three years prior to me receiving the script. It was when he had done Bait, the shark movie, and that was such a success. I was like, "Sharks in a supermarket, how do you make that work?" And he made it work. So when he wanted to mess around with spiders, I was like, "Okay, if you want to send it my way, I'd love to work with you." If I'm going to spend two months of my life working with a director, I want to enjoy it.
When Kimble sent me the script, I really dug it. It had the Indiana Jones aspect meets Arachnophobia. And he also allowed me to work out the character and change some pieces and add to it. It was easy to say "yes" to.
With Shane Abbess' The Osiris Child and now 7 Guardians of the Tomb, you've taken on roles in different projects that are a little more out there and interesting for you to dive into as an actor.
Kellan Lutz: Yeah, I love working in Australia and working with Australians. I love Osiris Child. With Shane, I got to be a bit method and live my character of Sy Lombrok. And with 7 Guardians of the Tomb, it didn't call for that as much. They're quite different, but both were awesome experiences.
This movie throws its characters in some insane situations, but all of the characters are grounded in a way that makes it easy to go on the ride with them. The cast in this film seems to have a close-knit chemistry. What was it like working with them, including Kelsey Grammer?
Kellan Lutz: It is always interesting when you get along so well with the antagonist of the movie. I had worked with Kelsey on Expendables 3 and had such a great time getting to know him on that one. We were actually attached to a couple of other movies, so I'm glad that this one worked out. We were a very organic family on set. We would all just sit around Kelsey and hear stories from his life—the ups, the downs, he was just vulnerable and open, and that's so cool for younger actors to have someone at his caliber share some wisdom with us. We organically created such a tight-knit group that we just loved hanging out together. No one would go back to the trailer. Whenever there was a scene change, we would just grab a coffee and share more stories.
Your previous movie Osiris Child had amazing digital effects and the CG effects for 7 Guardians of the Tomb are also really good and make these spiders seem believable. When you were filming the movie, was there anything there to react to, or was it a mixture of practical and digital?
Kellan Lutz: A little bit of both. Kimble would hide some spiders around set and scare us, putting them on the food tray or in our scripts or chairs, just so he could get us in that unexpected state. He would put some toy spiders on set and he had some real ones as well, and then a lot of CGI where you just had to envision them. Everything worked great. I loved having the toys there so we could actually see where they would be.
That's a classic prank with the fake spider. Do you not like spiders in real life or do you not mind them?
Kellan Lutz: I don't mind spiders. I don't like cockroaches. If this movie was all about killer cockroaches, that would take a lot of work for me to do a movie about them.
Maybe that would be in the sequel if there were an 8 Guardians of the Tomb.
Kellan Lutz: I hope not [laughs].
Raised on a steady diet of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps books and Are You Afraid of the Dark?, Derek has been fascinated with fear since he first saw ForeverWare being used on an episode of Eerie, Indiana.
When he’s not writing about horror as the Senior News Reporter for Daily Dead, Derek can be found daydreaming about the Santa Carla Boardwalk from The Lost Boys or reading Stephen King and Brian Keene novels.
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