“Oh My Gosh, I'm Relating To The Robot”
The director and stars of Companion talk about their subversive sci-fi horror movie, and why you can’t trust nice guys.
In 2022, Drew Hancock had come up with a great idea for a killer robot movie. It came “fully baked into my brain,” he tells Inverse: Three couples go into a cabin in the middle of the woods. One of them discovers they’re a robot. “And then things go south from there,” Hancock says.
He got to work on a script for Companion right away, and the thing practically wrote itself. It was an easy horror structure — a character “would get picked off every 10 pages,” as the group dealt with the killer robot. It was “one of those movies we've seen a billion times, which is AI gone wrong,” Hancock says. He finished the script quickly. And six months later, M3GAN, Blumhouse’s sleeper hit about a — you guessed it — killer robot opened in theaters. But thankfully, at that point, Hancock had already reversed course in a major way.
“As I'm breaking the story, we get to the point where [the robot] is at the house and she's nervous about meeting his friends. Suddenly I'm tapping into these repressed memories that I have of meeting partners' friends and families. And I'm suddenly going, oh my gosh, I'm relating to the robot more than I'm relating to the human characters,” Hancock says.
Drew Hancock on set with Sophie Thatcher.
So Hancock changed the movie’s protagonist. Originally, his script’s hero would’ve been Josh, the boyfriend of the secret robot, Iris. But in the final version of the film, Josh, as played by Jack Quaid, is eventually revealed to be the antagonist — a surprise twist for anyone who knows Quaid’s work in The Boys and Lower Decks, where he plays perpetual nice guys. But in Companion, Josh is a Nice Guy — someone who plays at being the good guy, but is resentful that he hasn’t gotten everything he thinks he deserves.
“Josh is one of the most insecure characters I've ever played, and I love that he's the antagonist of this movie,” Quaid tells Inverse. I think a lesser version of this movie, same subject matter, would've made Josh the protagonist. And I'm so happy [Drew] found his empathy going more with Iris, which is absolutely the right call.”
Spoilers ahead for Companion!
A Killer Final Girl
Sophie Thatcher was the only actress to nail Iris’ transformation.
Companion follows Josh and Iris on that weekend getaway at a private lakeside villa, where Iris is taken advantage of by the villa’s rich owner, Sergey (Rupert Friend). When she attempts to defend herself, she accidentally fatally stabs him, leading Josh to shut her down while he and his friends call the police. But a few wrenches are thrown into the works: It turns out that Iris’ murder of Sergey wasn’t quite an accident. And as Iris figures out exactly what part Josh had to play in this, her desperation to survive, and her budding independence, grow even stronger. It’s a tough arc to play for any actor, but for Hancock, Sophie Thatcher was the only one to nail Iris’ transformation from docile robot to independent woman.
“Sophie was it,” Hancock says. “If we didn't have Sophie, I don't know if the movie would work.”
During the casting process, in which Hancock and co. received 300 self-tapes, no one could perfectly embody both halves of Iris: the first “passive and submissive” Iris, and the second “empowered badass” who “has the ability to be an action star.” But when Thatcher walked in and did a chemistry read with Quaid over Zoom, Hancock knew she was the one.
Iris on the run.
“That's just a testament to her abilities to play both sides and make it seem grounded in reality, but also have this uncanny valley-ness to it,” Hancock says.
Thatcher credits her success with Iris to the fact that she’s played a few “final girls” in her career — starring in horror movies like The Boogeyman and Heretic — and that Iris is just a different kind of horror movie survivor. “I've done the final girl, but they always have such incredible arcs,” Thatcher tells Inverse. “She is a person, to me. She is the most human of everybody, but she starts off completely different and just changes, shifts completely.”
Not A Nice Guy
Josh does not handle the breakup well.
It was a challenge for Hancock to get the audience, who are so used to killer robots being, well, evil, to believe that Iris was their hero. The key was twofold: to get the audience into Iris’ POV, which wasn’t hard to do once he decided to frame the first half of the movie from her perspective and to get them to root against Josh.
“Her journey, it's a journey that we've all been on before,” Hancock says. “We're not robots, but we've all been in relationships where we've felt like we've been programmed. You leave the relationship, you break up, and then you look back and you go, why was I ever in love with this person? But she's literally programmed and… the antagonist of the movie needs to be someone who's controlling and programming her. So obviously Josh is going to have to be the bad guy there. And it shouldn't be seen as a commentary on all men, but it’s a commentary on a certain type of man.”
And what kind of man is that?
“Oh, he is the definition of an incel,” Thatcher says. “All he wants is to control women. And she doesn't know a world without that. And I think that's also very real, and a lot of women feel that it's been put on us to feel that way.”
“Josh is a villain who does not know he's the villain,” Quaid adds. “He thinks that he's in the right, he considers himself a romantic, he considers himself a good guy, but that's all a lie.”
As Josh, Quaid is a textbook “Nice Guy.”
Quaid’s casting was essential to getting this heel-turn to work. Hancock needed an actor with a certain “boyishness” to make Josh and the awful things he says feel just forgivable enough — until he wasn’t. Quaid, who broke out as the boy-next-door hero of The Boys, fits that description, and for most of his career has been typecast as generally good guys. So his casting in Companion makes for a nice subversion of his acting persona, and helps Josh’s “subtle transition to when he becomes evil-evil,” Hancock says.
“He's got that aw-shucks smile that you're like, I root for this guy,” Hancock continues. “He had all the necessary ingredients that you need to make Josh like someone that you didn't want to punch in the face immediately.”
Eventually, though, you really want to punch Josh in the face. And Iris does that and more, and — like many a great final girl — survives.
“She learns to find herself and love herself, and I think that's the biggest takeaway from her character and from me as a person,” Thatcher says.
Sequel Plans?
Is Iris starting the robot revolution?
So, is there a future franchise for Iris, alongside other “killer robots” like M3GAN before her? For Hancock, probably not. “I told my story,” he says. “My sequel would be like, she goes off, she uses the $12 million to buy a farm, and then she just spends the rest of her life farming the land and watching the sunset.”
“I think Iris isn't looking to create a robot revolution,” he concludes. “She's just wanting to live very human moments, and I don't think there's anything more human than enjoying a sunset.”
