Wagner Moura & Greta Lee Detail The Last House’s Tough Stunts, “The Most Physically Demanding Thing I Have Ever Done”
If you’ve been on the internet at all, then the hype surrounding The Last House, which stars Greta Lee and Wagner Moura and recently debuted on Netflix, has surely come across any of your myriad feeds in the last few months. Apart from an incredibly talented cast, the premise for this new sci-fi film feels refreshingly unique as it centers on a family of four who find themselves trapped inside their own home with no way out. Not only do they have to fight against the dwindling resources within their house in an attempt not to starve to death, but also a mysterious entity that now waits just outside.
Sitting down with ComicBook to talk about the film and all the work that went into it, The Last House‘s Wagner Moura opened up about the unique relationship that he had to build with costar Greta Lee, and how that shaped the film as a whole. Asked what helped them bond initially, Moura said, “We had different roles, like you said, in order to make that family safe as parents and as adults. And it was interesting because that also merged into our relationship with the kids, but the younger actors of the film, we felt that we needed to take care of them, and we had different roles, like Greta and I, throughout the shooting.” Elaborating on that, Lee said, “There’s a lot of thought put into creating this marriage, this union between Anne and Jason. I think Wagner and I both really wanted to make sure that we could present like an authentic marriage and it felt important to us to actually show a good marriage, because arguably that’s what sets them apart from everyone else around them.”
It Wasn’t Just The Relationship That Brought The Last House to Life, But Also the Insane Stunts
And these stunts were no small task either, with Moura calling the experience “the physically demanding thing I have ever done in my life.” While it might seem like a movie set mostly between the four walls of a house would come with minimal stunt work, that can’t be farther from the truth where The Last House is concerned. Explaining the lack of understanding of just what he and Lee were getting themselves into, Moura added, “It was hard, man. It was hard, but we got preparation for that. We learned how to hold our breaths, and we would do the scuba diving thing, and we worked with the survivalists. But I think that none of us, when we read the script, none of us were prepared for what happened there. It was very demanding.”
And while the film seems to have fallen flat with critics and audiences thus far, the stunts, performances, and the bonds between the family aren’t what they see as being the letdown; that honor goes to the script, which came across as anemic in some places and bloated in others. Credit for truly carrying the story forward goes to the cast, who manage to convince the audience the entire time that they are a family who, while managing their own fraught tensions, would truly do anything to keep each other safe. Despite the shaky writing, it’s those relationships that keep the movie on relatively even ground.
