There’s no shortage of the best Kurt Russell movies, with some of the best entries on that list including Escape from New York, Big Trouble in Little China and Tombstone. And then there’s 1982’s The Thing, the John Carpenter-helmed adaptation of John W. Campbell’s Who Goes There? that saw Russell’s R.J. Macready and his cohorts dealing with a shapeshifting alien in Antarctica. More than 40 years after that flick’s release, and while speaking with CinemaBlend, Russell dug into how one of the action sequences in his new show Monarch: Legacy of Monsters reminded him of The Thing.
Russell was one of the first actors to be added to the Monarch: Legacy of Monsters cast, with Apple TV+ subscribers watching him place Lee Shaw in the 2015 storyline, while his son Wyatt plays Lee during the 1950s. Episodes 3 and 4, titled “Secrets and Lies” and “Parallels and Interiors,” saw Lee and his new, young friends in Alaska fleeing from the Frost Vark, which was the “most challenging” Titan to design for the show. I asked Russell what his experience was like shooting that sequence, and he answered:
It was reminiscent of when we worked on a glacier in The Thing. Yeah, very much so. But it was very cold when we worked on the glacier in Alaska in The Thing, and it was very warm, actually, on this one. But sure did remind me of it, and you had to watch where you walked.
There may have been snow everywhere when Kurt Russell was acting out the Frost Vark sequence alongside Anna Sawai, Kiersey Clemons and Ren Watanabe, but the temperature difference was noticeable enough when compared to when he was working on The Thing. Still, one can’t fault the man for thinking of that 1982 movie given the similar surroundings. Of course, both The Thing and Monarch also both spotlight monsters, although obviously the Titans far surpass the former movie’s title creature in size.
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters also marks Kurt Russell’s return to TV for the first time since he played Elvis Presley in the 1979 TV movie Elvis, for which he earned an Emmy nomination. The TV landscape has changed a lot since then, so I was inquired with the actor about what it was like not just jumping aboard a small screen project over 40 years later, but one that’s on a similar scale to his blockbuster movies from recent years. Here’s what he had to say:
Very difficult. Figured it would be quite an undertaking. 10 hours is like doing 5 movies back to back to back to back to back if they’re each 2 hours long. You don’t know exactly what the future’s going to be in terms of the scripts themselves. Hey, not easy, but the ideas is to try to make that invisible. So we went after it.
While the honor of first MonsterVerse TV show goes to the animated Skull Island, which can be viewed with a Netflix subscription, Monarch is the franchise’s first live-action, small screen offering. Granted, this series places more of a focus on the humans since it’s delving into the history of the Monarch scientific organization, but there’s no shortage of Titan-fueled action, including a fight between the Mother Long Legs and MantleClaw in the first episode that John Goodman’s Bill Randa got caught in the middle of, as well as Godzilla, who’s been enhanced from the 2014 MonsterVerse-launching movie, popping up across both time periods. So even though this is Kurt Russell’s first TV show in decades, the experience of working on it felt like he was working on a lot of big movies in swift succession.
We’re now at the halfway mark with Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, which drops news episodes on Friday. Keep visiting CinemaBlend for more coverage on the latest MonsterVerse installment, and remember that the franchise is also delivering Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire to the 2024 movies schedule on April 12.
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