Robert Sheehan

“What if it sucks? What if it’s amazing? What if it’s dangerous? What if it’s exciting? What if we die? What if we live?”

Q: What’s the situation your characters face at the start of the film? -

Rupert: It’s quite complicated, there’s many layers to this. The plot of the movie is based on an existing conspiracy theory that NASA got Stanley Kubrick to film a fake moon landing just in case the real one didn’t work, and they send out Ron Perlman, a CIA agent, to find Stanley Kubrick. Then he bumps into me, and I pose as Stanley Kubrick’s agent and address Leon, Rob’s character, and pretend he’s Stanley Kubrick. [To Rob]: Do you want to take it from there?

Rob: Basically, we get the stupid American’s money! There you go! [Laughs] Where he basically suffers from post traumatic stress cause he’s straight out of Vietnam, and so we manage to kind of dupe him in his time of vulnerability and get the budget for the moon-landing movie from him. Then all sorts of chaos ensues.

Q: What was it like to work with Ron Perlman? 

Rob: There’s a scene where Ron’s character comes back and sort of figures out what’s happened and everything and is threatening to burn our crappy apartment down, and the three of us were laughing so uncontrollably in the scene. Laughter that has gone beyond the funny or the rational. It’s sort of muscle memory laughter that you can’t undo. The more you try to fight against it the more it gets you. So we had to abandon that scene. Worst of all, he’d gone around pinching people’s bums, giving people purple nurples, having one of them shocking things in his palm whenever you shook his hand. I’ll tell you, clowning around Perlman.

Q: How does the “moon landing” go wrong?  -

Rupert: They were always fun scenes to do in the house because it was just the most kind of stereotypical 60’s artists kind of abode, with like naked women body painting, there was some ridiculous things in the house.

Rob: On some mornings, we’d come into the house with a cup of tea, half asleep, to begin the day, and lots of the supporting artists, the extras, would be already there and somewhat sort of dressed in the scene, naked, and like it’s half past seven in the morning. This seems a bit early for crazy, heady nudity.

Q: Do you think the actual moon landing could have been staged? -

Rob: I think it’s more likely that the moon is an egg. That’s his theory [points to Rupert].

Rupert: Yeah

Rob: He’s been going on about the moon being an egg.

Rupert: We don’t know, we really don’t know.

Brain: Time to think about Robert Sheehan.

Me: No, wait, why?