John Bradley Reveals What He Had To Unlearn For Moonfall - Exclusive
You would think that John Bradley had seen it all during his eight seasons on "Game of Thrones." Cast right out of acting school — in his first major role — as Samwell Tarly, loyal friend and lieutenant to Jon Snow (Kit Harington), Bradley spent a lot of the next ten years in freezing cold, wet conditions, traveling across the icy landscapes beyond the Wall (represented by real-life, quite chilly locations in Iceland and Northern Ireland), battling wights, running from White Walkers and generally scrambling from or into danger.
Bradley took a year off after "Game of Thrones" wrapped, getting some distance from the role of Sam and telling The Wrap that he was looking for different characters to portray. The first one to arrive onscreen is K.C. Houseman, the janitor and presumed conspiracy theorist who turns out to be quite the accomplished scientist in Roland Emmerich's new space disaster flick, "Moonfall." Houseman is the unlikely hero who first spots trouble on the Moon, determining that it's veering off its orbit and headed towards Earth.
That discovery and the impending destruction of Earth send Houseman on a mission to the Moon alongside trained astronauts Halle Berry and Patrick Wilson, and it was for the scenes on the space shuttle that Bradley had to learn a whole new way of moving — or rather, unlearn an old one. "As soon as we got that into our heads, it all made sense," he tells Looper. "But it was just such a different physical discipline to click into."
What John Bradley had to do differently for Moonfall
Unsurprisingly, there is plenty of action in "Moonfall" and John Bradley often found himself in the thick of it. When he, Berry, and Wilson fly to the Moon in the film's third act, Bradley faced a whole new challenge he'd never experienced before on a set. "The zero gravity stuff was quite difficult," he tells Looper. "It wasn't necessarily physically difficult. It was more mentally difficult because it just goes against all the accepted implicit laws of motion that you learn from a very young age."
Swimming around the shuttle convincingly forced Bradley to literally relearn how to move. "We spoke to some astronauts about this, and they said the key to moving through zero gravity is to totally forget that it's your legs that are your main engine," he explains. "It's your arms in zero G, your legs don't do anything. Your legs are dead weight and you steer yourself around with your arms."
Other aspects of "Moonfall" surprised Bradley as well, such as a scene in which he and Wilson are trapped in a flooded hotel that involved practical effects. "Before I started that scene, I thought, 'They're bound to do some kind of CGI technical wizardry. I wonder how they're going to make it look like the hotel lobby's flooded,'" Bradley recalls. "Turns out they flooded it and it was gallons and gallons of filthy water ... it was fun and it looks cool in the movie, but I won't want to do it too often because I swallowed a gargantuan amount of filthy water that day and I don't want to repeat that anytime soon."
"Moonfall" is now playing in theaters.