The Most Difficult Scene To Film In Netflix's Spiderhead Isn't What You'd Expect
Psychotropic drugs, prisons, and bureaucracy make for strange bedfellows in Netflix's new movie "Spiderhead." The film is about inmates at a secluded penitentiary who have volunteered to take mood-altering substances that can invoke feelings as extreme as unbridled passion or agonizing pain and psychological torture. Much like the individuals in "The Suicide Squad," these inmates are undergoing such tests in hopes of their sentences being commuted, but the drugs have the power to completely overwhelm the senses.
Chris Hemsworth stars as Steve Abnesti, who heads up these twisted experiments and serves as the primary antagonist of "Spiderhead." Meanwhile, Miles Teller plays Jeff, the protagonist of the film, and one of the several inmates participating in Abnesti's disturbing trials. Due to the nature of the drugs they are given, we see the characters in "Spiderhead" experience a vast range of potent emotions, often with the literal press of a button. Anger, sorrow, compassion, love, and obedience are all on full display as these feelings turn on with ease, though sometimes with unintended consequences, as we see in the ending of "Spiderhead."
Although the actors make it seem easy, flipping through such extreme emotions is likely no small feat. And in fact, for one "Spiderhead" star, one of these drug-induced scenes proved to be the most difficult to film in the entire movie.
Teller said a scene involving a euphoria-inducing drug was the hardest to film
In a short video and article from Netflix, Chris Hemsworth, Miles Teller, and fellow co-star Jurnee Smollett, who plays Lizzy, were asked a series of rapid-fire questions about the making of "Spiderhead." When Teller was asked to give his choice for the toughest scene from the movie to film, he pointed to a segment where his character Jeff and Hemsworth's Abnesti dose themselves with a euphoria-inducing drug. "Probably the Laffodil scene with Chris and I," Teller explained, "just because we were just having to laugh on queue for a couple of hours." While you might think that one of the scenes involving the extreme depression-inducing drug Darkenfloxx would be the most difficult to perform, Teller's choice actually makes perfect sense from an acting standpoint.
Fake laughter can be easy to detect, and keeping a convincing high-induced laugh going through a filming day has to be taxing, to say the least. According to an article on how to convincingly laugh on cue from Casting Frontier, invoking a true-sounding laugh can sometimes require a plethora of tips and tricks, like reflecting on previous experiences, training the body to create laughter, and carefully observing the laughter of others and attempting to mimic. It seems like Teller and Hemsworth may have had to pull out all of those stops to get their own laughing scene just right.