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NEW YORK, Feb. 14 (UPI) -- Top Gun: Maverick, The Offer and Whiplash actor Miles Teller says he jumped at the chance to star in the movie The Gorge because it was such a unique spin on several well-worn genres. "it just felt like a really fresh idea. It was very original," Teller, 37, told UPI in a recent Zoom interview.
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"When I was reading it, I was just imagining it and I think it takes a lot of twists and turns, but it always felt grounded to me and it's always been about the love story," he said.
"Everybody that was working on the project from top to the bottom knew that was the focus. That's why I really wanted to to do the project. And I get this wonderfully talented, beautiful co-star, who had been a friend of mine before this and, so, it was really just a lovely experience."
Premiering Friday on Apple TV+, the film stars Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy as Levi and Drasa, accomplished snipers hired by shadowy agents to guard opposite sides of a ravine filled with monsters for a year.
Although they are not supposed to have any contact with each other, lonely Drasa reaches out to Levi on her birthday and the two quickly fall in love in the movie, which was helmed by Scott Derrickson, director of Black Phone and Doctor Strange.
"For me, it was Miles," Taylor-Joy, 28, said about why she wanted to star in the Valentine's Day creature-feature-rom-com release.
"We've known each other for years and I always wanted to work with him. And I thought that this script, as he said, was highly original, but I also had faith that we could pull it off," she added. "I think if the love story fails, then the rest of the movie really fails and I thought Miles and I could do it."
Because their characters are isolated for weeks in their respective guard towers before connecting, the stars were happy when they finally had another human with which to share the screen.
"It was so much fun," Taylor-Joy said.
"We got to shoot it mostly chronologically and, so, I think we had that experience of [asking each other]: 'How was your day in the tower? How was my day in the tower?' And then, finally, he crossed over, and we're like: 'You're here! We get to do this together now."
Scenes in which Drasa and Levi work together to fight what lives in the gorge become more complicated and interesting, too, because they've grown to care about and are trying to protect one another as opposed to just trying to keep themselves alive.
"We have so many big set pieces in this movie, but without that emotional component, it could probably feel a bit dry. But, because we were both looking out for each other, it felt really alive and exciting," Taylor-Joy said.
Teller and Taylor-Joy are no strangers to the intense training required for action movies, but this project was particularly grueling since Drasa and Levi are the only humans running, jumping and fighting on camera for most of the film.
"It's a very physical movie and, when you're doing a movie of this size, you really do need to take care of yourself physically," Teller said.
"There are very long hours and a lot of different trainings," he added. "For instance, that rifle that I carry at the end of the movie weighs 100 pounds and, a lot of the time, I wanted to carry the real one just to feel what these guys would be going through. The endurance that they have is exceptional."
"It was a lot," agreed Taylor-Joy, a Golden Globe winner for The Queen's Gambit.
"But I rolled into this movie straight after Furiosa and, so, I had the strength from Furiosa to kind of bring me to the starting line here," the actress added.
"It's just wonderful when you are part of a team that is all committed to getting you ready to pull these things off. There's a real sense of Joint accomplishment when you do pull it off."
Teller joked that not everything during the production was equal since American Levi's accommodations seemed much more austere than Russian Drasa's luxe digs.
"Her tower was much more comfortable than mine. I was like: 'My God, you have instruments? You have music? You've got candles?'" Teller said. "Mine was a Cold War bunker."
"He's got potato vodka and I'm rocking in my tower," Taylor-Joy laughed.
Of course, the heroes don't have much time to hang out at home once terrifying monsters start speedily scaling the sides of the ravine, trying to eat them on their way to escape into the countryside.
"They're very specific to this world we are creating, these monsters that exist purely from the circumstances that have been created for them," Teller said, careful not to give too much of the bigger story-line away.
"A lot of [actors who play] those beings, the enemies that were dealing with, they went through hours and hours of prosthetics and hair and makeup, so when we saw them for the first time, I think we were just both taken back and and excited about the level of detail that was being used."
Taylor-Joy noted that there was surprisingly little use of computer-generated special effects in the film's most thrilling sequences.
"You would think, with the size and scope of the world, that a lot of it would be CGI and it was just not that way," she added.
"Mostly everything is practical. Our towers are real. The sections of the gorge that you see us interacting with? They're real. They're all built in a sound stage and, so, we're really interacting with these things and that's just such a gift as an actor."
