“Hold him down. Take his d— out,” Orlando Bloom commands while wielding an iron in the first trailer for Deep Cover, debuting exclusively with Entertainment Weekly.
But don’t worry, he’s just going where the scene takes him.
Directed by Tom Kingsley, the action comedy follows three improv comics, led by Bryce Dallas Howard’s comedy teacher, Kat, who get recruited by Detective Sergeant DS Billings (played by Sean Bean) for a sting operation. One of those students is Bloom’s Marlon, a method actor who wants to be Al Pacino, but lacks the skills to back up those dreams.
“He really commits and he is improvising out of control, which is quite scary to his friends,” Kingsley tells EW about Bloom’s character. “Orlando was really smart about why the character was funny and how he could play it by basically committing completely to the role. He’s really up for making fun of himself.”
Joining Marlon and Kat on this mission is their friend Hugh, played by Ted Lasso‘s Nick Mohammed, who happens to be an old friend of Kingsley’s in real life. “Nick has always been a star,” the director says. “He manages to make the smallest, simplest things hilarious, and you see a lot of great improvisation from him in this movie.”
In one scene shown in the trailer, the trio is tasked with buying illegal cigarettes from a corner store, and Hugh’s commitment to improv sends them down a dangerous path.
“They get into deep water because Hugh takes the improv idea of saying ‘yes and’ to the extreme, and he leads them into a higher-stakes situation,” Kingsley explains.
“The problem is that Hugh asks for something more, and that’s when it turns out they’re selling drugs, and they can be hooked up with the gang that’s supplying the drugs,” he adds. “This is not what [Billings] was planning.”
Enter an Albanian gang led by a kingpin played by Ian McShane. “He’s up for cutting people up into little bits and disposing of them in the River Thames,” Kingsley says.
Surprisingly, for a film about improv comics, there wasn’t much improvising in the movie, except for Mohammed. The one notable exception is screenwriters Ben Ashenden and Alexander Owen, who pop up as detectives in the film. “They are watching the biggest scene of the movie unfold, and they did this amazing five-minute improv take, just saying hilarious things about the action,” Kingsley recalls.
Peter Mountain
Orlando Bloom, Bryce Dallas Howard and Nick Mohammed star in ‘Deep Cover.’
Hugh and Marlon, however, “are not brilliant at improv,” according to the director. It’s up to Howard’s struggling-comedian-turned-teacher to keep them from getting into trouble on their mission. “She’s trying to support her students,” Kingsley says. “She’s torn between wanting to help them do a good job and also trying to keep them all alive.”
The director notes that Howard, the last of the three main characters to be cast, adds a certain Hollywood star power to the mostly British ensemble. Still, one of his favorite days on set involved another American star close to the cast who visited while they were shooting in a corner store in Hackney.
“Hackney is not a particularly fancy area of London, and it was surreal having Bryce and Orlando in that location, but then Katy Perry chose that day to visit the set,” he reveals. “Having these massive global superstars in this tiny, rundown shop was insane to me.”
Deep Cover will “yes and” its way onto Prime Video on June 12.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
