ComingSoon’s Tyler Treese spoke with Cold Storage stars Liam Neeson, Joe Keery, and Georgina Campbell about their new comedy horror movie. The trio discussed finding humanity in a movie with fungal-based zombies, balancing tones, and their characters. Cold Storage is out in theaters nationwide on Friday, February 13.
“Teacake (Joe Keery) and Naomi (Georgina Campbell), two young employees of a self-storage company built on the site of an old US military base, have their wildest night shift ever when a parasitic fungus escapes from the lowest sublevel of the base, where it was sealed by the government decades before. As the temperature rises underground, this highly contagious and rapidly mutating microorganism multiplies and unleashes its brain-controlling, body-bursting terrors on the facility’s inhabitants – human and otherwise,” says the official description. “With time running out, it’s down to Teacake and Naomi, with the help of a grizzled retired bioterror operative (Liam Neeson), to contain the merciless menace and prevent the explosive extinction of Mankind itself.”
Tyler Treese: Liam, it’s really fun seeing you start in a David Koepp script. He wrote Jurassic Park and some other all time great movies. He also wrote the novel of Cold Storage. What about David’s writing in particular really captured your attention for this project?
Liam Neeson: Well, I enjoyed his novel very, very much. I’ve been a fan of David’s for many, many years. Some of the films you’ve mentioned, you know, Indiana Jones, Spider-Man, he’s terrific. It always comes down to the human relationships, and they’re very easy to identify with. These incredible things can be happening in the story — fungus from outer space, whatever it is. Monsters, you name it. But he always comes back to the human relationships that are very identifiable with.
Joe, you’ve got a really fun look for your character with the dyed blonde hair. He has a neck tattoo that says “Howdy.” How does finding a specific look for your character really help you as an actor?
Joe Keery: Oh, man, that’s a part of the fun of the job, I think. And you are blessed when you get a character like this, like Tea Cake. I feel like I really wanted to paint a picture that would give you kind of one specific initial impression of the character that we could slowly subvert throughout the movie with the relationship that me and Georgina kind of have.
Yeah, it just felt like it gives a lot of history to the character. And yeah, he’s like this little weird onion that unfolds and you kind of get to see the little layers pop through. And that he’s kind of more than meets the eye because that’s fun to watch. And I think at the end of the day it’s like a relatable thing because everybody sort of feels that way. Yeah.
I see your hair is blond now. Did Tea Cake teach you that blonds have more fun?
Joe Keery: Yeah, I’m having so much more fun. It’s like Christmas, I’m like dressing up for Christmas or for something. “Yeah, here I am, go see the movie.”
Georgina, Cold Storage has a lot of fun with genre and has a sense of humor about itself. One aspect of you in Barbarian that impressed me was that even when it would switch tones, you were able to match it. Can you speak to leaning into the humor of this film? Because there are these wild scenes, there’s a deer riding an elevator. This guy wants to puke in your mouth. It gets very over the top.
Georgina Campbell: Yeah, it was so fun. I mean, it’s all there on the page. David wrote such an incredible script, and that was a big reason I wanted to do it, to get to do something that’s kind of fun and, as I said earlier, boisterous. Yes, there are big, high stakes, but to be able to have fun within it and enjoy these little moments. And it feels quite, as you said, human, it feels quite real that you would kind of end up laughing even though you wanna cry because everything that’s happening is so insane.
Liam, I really like the movie Ordinary Love, so it is so exciting to see you and Leslie Manville share the screen together again. And even if the two films are very different tonally, how was it getting to reconnect with her and in a more fun circumstance?
Liam Neeson: It was great. Leslie and I are dear friends, have been since we shot that film in Belfast eight years ago, I think. She’s a remarkable actress. It just seems effortless with Leslie Manville. Just effortless. I’ve seen her on stage too a couple of times, three times. She’s just one of those… She’s a great actress. She just is a delight.
Joe, it’s been fun seeing your acting choices since you’ve broken out with Stranger Things. I thought you killed it in Pavements recently. Can you just speak to how you select your projects and what caught your eye with Cold Storage?
Joe Keery: Well, I think Liam was saying like, this movie has a real human element. I think, although the circumstances are obviously supernatural and horror, and it’s a comedy and stuff, but David’s writing is real; there’s something really human about the characters that I think as an actor is just really enticing.
So I think it’s just about finding stories that have that little special kernel, ’cause not every script does. Things that are specific and things that inspire you in a way, or honestly, sometimes it’s when scripts remind me of people from my own life. That can be really inspiring to me as well. Yeah, you never really know. It’s just sort of whatever hits you in the moment, too.
Georgina, the last act of this is so exciting. All three of you finally share this screen, and you get a big pep talk from Liam Neeson about how you’re gonna take on these fungus zombies. He hands you a gun. What was it like filming that moment? Because that’s just a movie moment right there. That had to be cool.
Georgina Campbell: That was so fun. I think that was, for me, like the first or second day. We were doing the exterior stuff. It was great. It was amazing. It’s Liam Neeson, and I was saying earlier, I told my dad that I was doing a movie with Liam Neeson, and my dad was actually really impressed [laughs]. He was like, “Oh, okay, you’re doing some good work now.” So yeah, it was fantastic.
Thanks to Liam Neeson, Joe Keery, and Georgina Campbell for taking the time to talk about Cold Storage.
