Brian A. Prince & Kyle Strauts Interview

Brian A. Prince and Kyle Strauts are actors who played the Predators (as well as the deleted Emissary Predators) in 2018’s The Predator from Shane Black. Prince played the Fugitive Predator /Emissary Predator and has a background in stunt work for movies and TV shows. Strauts played the Upgrade Predator / Emissary Predator and has been acting for 10 years and is a dancer and a teacher.

We sat down and had a chat with them for Episode #75 of the AvPGalaxy Podcast in October 2018. We asked them how they originally got the roles and how hard it was acting in the practical Predator suits. You can listen to the podcast below or read on for a full transcription:

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Aaron: We’re joined by two special guests you’ve probably seen in a film that’s come out recently – Brian Prince and Kyle Strauts. Who you are, what you did in The Predator and what you do outside of being intergalactic hunters?

Brian: My name’s Brian Prince. I play the Fugitive Predator in the movie The Predator. I also played one of the emissaries which we will not see unfortunately. I have a stunt background I’ve been doing stunt work in film and TV for about three to four years. I still consider myself pretty much a novice in it. I’ve been doing parkour for ten years. I am probably the world’s tallest parkour athlete but who’s to say. I’m also an illustrator, went to Savannah College of Art and Design for sequential art so I primarily work in comics, storyboarding and character design. Worked a little bit on indie games, freelance artwork, early writing and drawing my own graphic novel. Other than, that’s who I am. I’m six feet nine and a half inches tall in case anyone wants to know.

Kyle: My name is Kyle Strauts. In the movie I play also one of the Emissaries you may never see and I play the Upgrade Predator. I did most of the proxy work except for the stuff in the third act. I also did some of the scenes of the Fugitive Predator when Brian was working on the same day. My history… I’ve been an actor for about ten years. I’ve been a dancer in a style called popping for 14 years. I am also a certified double bachelor teacher. I was teaching for a little bit and yeah before that I was a professional lacrosse player. So, there’s a lot of things that have led up to where I’m at now.

Aaron: Aren’t you both athletes? Brian, didn’t you also do basketball or something?

Brian: Yeah, I played basketball pretty much my entire childhood. I come from a tall basketball family so it was just the thing we did. I stopped playing around 18, 19 when I went to college cuz I’m pretty good at basketball or at least I was. I just never loved it and so I wanted to do something I loved cuz it’s when you see people who have that thing that they do and they love doing it.

Like I knew that I never felt like that with the sport of basketball and I took a conscious choice to step away from it. That’s actually what led me to parkour very soon after and then as soon as I started doing that I just fell in love with it. I never imagined it would pay off. I’ve been doing parkour for ten years now in a parkour gym right now in Vancouver where I’m recording. It’s taken me all over the country. Made me friends that I never thought I’d meet and it’s got me opportunities that I never thought I’d have.

Adam: We kind of a small traditional in the podcast when we have special guests on. That is, we like to ask him about the first time they ever experienced the franchise they’ve become involved with. So, do you both remember the first time you ever encountered the Predator?

Kyle: I was born in 83 so it was about 1990 when I first had the experience and since then I’ve watched it probably 200 times. It’s an obscene number. Also when I got the job, I was like okay it’s time to just go crazy and watch all of these over and over and over. But the first time was with my oldest brother and I was watching it at his friend’s house because they were watching it in the basement on this little shitty like tiny TV screen and it was on VHS. I remember being terrified. I remember that the fact that it could go invisible. I remember that stuck with me as a child.

I’m like well if I’m in my house and he’s standing at my doorway and I used to wake up in the middle of the night and actually go “Is he standing in my room right now?” Yeah, he actually could be standing at the end of my bed and he could kill me and I wouldn’t know it and I had these crazy thoughts but then I became obsessed with that. I was like oh well imagine if I was a Predator so you get a little crazy when you’re a kid but I definitely remember the experience. It was in my older friend’s basement on this really ghetto couch, kind of crunched up all close together staring at it. I remember being terrified and excited at the same time.

Brian: For me the character has always kind of been there for me. I don’t remember the first time I was like that’s Predator. I was just like I was growing up kind of right alongside with Batman and Spiderman, the Predator was always a character that existed in my universe. I thought he was really cool, mostly from like the visual of the character – he had a plasma cannon on his shoulder, long dreadlocks and an awesome mask. I just always thought it was really badass and like very iconic so yeah, I don’t remember the exact moment but I do know the character has always kind of been there for me for sure

Adam: Which of the films would you say is your favorite?

Brian: My favorite is a toss-up between Predators and the first Predator. The first one just cuz it’s the first one. It had so many good moments and one liners in it. Such good characters but I really liked a lot of the things they tried to do with Predators. Specifically, I loved like the samurai showdown between that one Predator and then the Yakuza guy. I loved that moment so much because it’s like a callback to Billy in the first one but then also it carries through.

Kyle: I actually have a very similar opinion to Brian in that I really liked the first one cuz it is the first one. I liked that the Predator was kind of like Jaws in the sense that you don’t really see him as much and so when you do see him, he’s either wrecking shit, blowing shit up or doing something really detailed. Like it reminds me of the part when he’s up in the tree near the end and he uses that little kit to open it up.

For how he’s an alien, there was a lot of humanity in that moment whereas in Predators there wasn’t any intimate moments like that. But I like the stuff like the samurai showdown was just so cool and simple but said so much without having to show him do any crazy moves. Yeah, it’s a toss-up but I think I would lean a tiny bit more in the original just because I like those smaller moments.

Aaron: Is there a particular design or performance from any of the films that you would say is your favorite?

Kyle: I mean honestly, it’s Kevin in the original just cuz he really set the pace for it.

Brian: I would say Kevin in the original also because the fact there was nothing preceding that. He had probably no idea. He just kind of made some stuff up and what he thought was right and then I’m sure he talked to the director and he would ask him to do some stuff. I liked the fact that it was the first time and so his performance was something that was coming from like a self-inspired feeling of like “Okay well, what is this guy? How is he gonna move?”

Like when he first did that roar with his arms out, I really would love to know the answer. Did they just say “Roar now. Do something scary!”. Or were they like “Just put your arms out, crouch down and look forward and go Aaaarrrrrggghhh”. I’m coming from the actor mode so I think there’s something really cool about your intuitive sense on what draws you to a character to do what it does so I would say the first one.

Aaron: Let’s talk about The Predator. I’m always curious to hear about what people’s experiences are with actually getting the gig in the first place. What was the casting process like for The Predator?

Kyle: So, the casting process for me was as I said whether it’s that top hundred, I got thrown into and they pretty much would email me weekly and say “Hey you’ve made the top 75. Hey you’re in the top 50” and I’m thinking sitting here going “Oh like how cool would that be if I got the chance to like just audition for something this big” and then it was like okay you’re top 25 and at about top 15 they said “Send us everything you’ve ever done including my university degrees”. They wanted to see everything I’ve ever done in my life before they made these decisions and then one day I call and they said “Hey Kyle. Yeah you’ve made the top 5 in the North America. You’re flying to Los Angeles in one week to do a six-hour audition” and I was like holy shit.

So, for that next week I was in the gym every single day and I was literally watching the movie every day and writing notes on what I wanted to do cuz they said “Okay you can come with a presentation of how you want to do the character”. Well I wrote a little book. I have a little book in my room right now that has pictures of how I fought, what my weapons look like, what my moves were, his history, why he had scars. I just made up a full character cuz I was like fuck it, this is the time to go to that level. Obviously, I want this so I’m gonna go down.

Then when they flew me out, I didn’t really see any of the other performers and when we got to the place where we did the audition, I remember walking in and I saw this black dude just lying in this parkour gym and I went “Fuck you”. His movement was so beautiful. I was just like “Yeah, this is it” and so the process at the audition, it was split into three parts. One of the parts was a video portion and they pretty much kind of sat us in front of a camera and said “Well why do you think you should be the Predator and what are you gonna bring to the table?” I pretty much just whipped out my little book and I put it by my face and I was flipping pages and just telling stories for that portion and I think the draw was that because of my background, why I got to that top five is being 6’9”. I don’t see very many 6’9” actors like not guys that just stand there and look imposing but people who like have that meat and because my dance background.

It does a lot of really isolated movements. I think they saw potential there so where I think the meat of the performance happened was they said “Okay, run through this parkour course at this gym as your character” and they said “Hey you can start up here and want you to end here but everything you do in between is up to you” and they need all of the other actors to go outside so no one could copy each other’s performance. For my performance, I don’t really talk about it with many people but the first thing I did was we had to drop to this 12-foot hole onto a pad and I remember dropping down under the pad. It took me a good 30 seconds to get up cuz I had split my legs open and slowly looked up, looked around like just in silence.

It was a really special part of my performance that I loved but then from there I kind of like scanned around and made a bunch of weird sounds in my mouth and looked like a weirdo. I did some attack moves and I swing off the bars and jump through holes and did like a little like side 360 off the wall into like a strike and then the third portion of the audition was a wire work. I remember doing the wire work. We’re all kind of standing there, “Okay who wants to go first?” And I’m like “Me” and all the other guys look at me kind of like “Fuck you” and I remember looking at them and kind of being like “Are you guys cool with that?”

And everyone just kind of takes about five seconds of just like “Yeah okay”. I wanna set the bar or fuck up with glory. That was my time and so they had us do front flips, back flips like sprinting jumps, jump up in the air do a backflip and land 25 feet behind you. Then there was one where we do this running dash onto a ledge and then we jump backwards and do these really high-flying moves so that was the rough outline of how it went down for me.

Brian: My experience is entirely different because I was working in Seattle at a parkour gym called Parkour Visions and I was there for about a year, ten months or so. Great place. Great people. I really liked the job but yeah, I just was doing parkour and doing odd work on the side. That’s all I was doing. I moved from Atlanta where I had most of the stunt opportunities that I had before that so I wasn’t really expecting any work at the time. I was kind of taking a year to do my own thing and then yeah just one day I got a call from the stunt creator Lance Gilbert and he just called me. He’s like “Are you really like 6’9”, 6’10” and do parkour?”

And I was like “Yeah, who’s this?” And then he was “I’m Gilbert, I’m the coordinator” and explained what he was doing. Why he was calling me and then essentially asked me for my information which is pretty standard. You get a call then. You send them your resume headshot and a reel if you have it, some selfies of what you look like on the exact day so I sent him that information and then he got back to me very serious like “Yeah, I want to get you in for this audition for the new Predator movie” and I was like “Oh okay, wow, sure”. I got an email back later and “We’re flying you to LA next week” so kind of what Kyle was saying with like the hundred down to fifty.

I didn’t even know about any of that. I was just in Seattle working my job and then I went to LA a week later and they flew me out for the audition and it’s kind of like there’s zero part of me that expected to get this job and I don’t mean that negatively. I just was like no you can’t you can’t do that. You can’t just like get a call in a week and go be a Predator. That’s not a thing so I went in literally not expecting anything and that ended up helping me more than anything else because I just looked at the whole thing as a win-win. I got to go to LA for a few days. The audition was that Tempest Freerunning Academy which is a parkour gym in the valley outside of LA. I’ve always wanted to go there so I was like win-win, this is great and so I showed up to the audition.

It was Kyle and three other guys who were roughly our same height and same deal. They got us on video, what are you bringing to the table. That was all awkward like “I do parkour” I didn’t even have that much to say. I don’t like talking so it wasn’t very long but so then we did the audition and what really helped with that is a bunch of good friends of mine run the sport parkour league. Essentially they run parkour competitions all over the country and one of the format’s is the style format. The way that they do it is start in a spot and you can end in a certain area and you have to interact with a certain amount of obstacles throughout the competition or throughout the course. So when they were like “Okay so for the audition, you’re gonna start here and end here and kind of do whatever you want the middle”.

I was like “It’s just like a style comp. I can do that”. And so the same thing, I was like “Well I’m not gonna get this gig” and it was parkour that got me here so I’m just gonna quickly come up the parkour line but I’m gonna mix it in with like this creature movement, like hunting thing so what I what I really wanted was like I kind of tried to emulate like a hunting dog. Like moving slowly and then it would like peek its ears and then scatter over to an area and then slow down and so I picked the points that I wanted to go through and then between the points just decided like “Okay what movement can I do here?”

And so, I ended up putting together something with some like reverse step volts where I’d be going backwards while looking forwards. I had a few rolls and I had a roll or two in there. I did like some swinging on the bar, some perching. That was really fun actually to put together and I just felt really in my element on it. Then after that we did the work that Kyle had mentioned earlier and yeah same deal. I was like I’ve never been on a wire before and so it was really tough for me to go so Kyle went first. I never liked going first.

I always like going third to fourth. I never want to go first because my body wants to go first but then I get like it like too anxious about it and then it just falls apart. When I went, I just was like ”Okay I can do backflips so I guess I’ll just do that” but it was definitely tough because of the wire portion of it but as long as I avoided the wires. Once I started realizing how to avoid the wires and work with the riggers better, I was able to get around and do it but essentially that was the whole audition process for me.

Adam: When you both got your roles, what sort of preparation did you do for the film? I remember seeing pictures of you both in the gym so I assume you guys did plenty of physical training but did you also go back and kind of dissect the performances of the previous actors like Kevin Peter Hall or Ian Whyte?

Brian: Yes, for me. I definitely did but probably unpopular truth, I didn’t do it too much. I didn’t want to just copy things and so I actually found myself not looking at a lot of things too much because I know me. Like if I look at something too much, I’m just gonna think about it a lot and then that becomes the norm of it and like if I’m not doing that, then I feel like I’m doing something wrong. So, one thing that really helped was in the prep time, I learned a lot of wire work, a lot of various stunt training, fighting, running. A lot of things like that.

Me and Kyle got together. We did a lot of fun things where we would like go walk around the room together in unison and like match each other’s movements and that was really cool but the thing that ended up helping me out the most was… so I’m a character designer. That’s what I went to school for and so what I thought about was like okay well if I was designing this character. Like if someone came to me and was like “Okay you’re gonna draw the Predator for a comic right”. They’re gonna be like “How would I approach that project?”

And so, I made a list of how I would design any other character where like what attributes are strong about this character. What shapes really sell the character. What physical features are gonna be like the most predominant and so in doing that, I kind of found other characters that I was inspired by other fictional characters that weren’t just the Predator because obviously the Predator was on that list. I was looking at characters like the Hulk, Juggernaut, Kratos from God of War so I’m a huge fan of the God of War series and I always loved Kratos as a character design.

He’s eight feet tall, his chest is always out, he does not look backwards, he always looks forwards and there was a lot of features that I liked. I wanna bring this to what I’m doing. So, I mixed that with some of the other things that I really liked from Kevin’s performances and from Ian’s performances. I tried to kind of create this blend of all of those things together and that’s what I ended up mostly putting together for my performance.

Aaron: I vaguely remember reading that you listen to music as well?

Brian: Yeah every day when I was tuning up I actually was listening to the God of War soundtrack from God of War 3 because when I was looking at it from just a stunt thing, it was hard to kind of get into character but it was actually something that Alec Gillis told me where he was like watching Ian and the other guys do it. It’s more of a dance than anything else and when he told me that I was like “Oh wow that makes so much sense”. So I would just listen to this music that would kind of put me in the mindset of the character. Like I had a whole playlist on my Spotify and then I would like basically just start acting while listening to the music in a dance kind of way to kind of just put me into that zone.

Kyle: I think our prep processes are quite different. I went and watched the films and yeah okay I want to see what these people brought to the performance and what can I bring to the performance that will stay true to what people see as characteristics of a Predator but also my personal thing was like I want to bring a new personality to the Predator. Like how every human has a personality. I’m Kyle. He’s Bryan. We all have our identities. I wanted to bring like an identity of a Predator that was unique but they felt true their lore.

So, a lot of mine was when I’d watched the films, I watched a lot of the acting nuances so I would look at “What did he do with his fingers? What did he do when he heard a sound? Did he snap his head? Did he turn his head slow? Did he like puff up his chest?” So, I would look at a lot of like the small physical nuances and relating to Brian’s last note about dance because I’ve been dancing for so long. That was where a lot of my character work in general, from the other performances I’ve done outside of Predator, have to do very tightly to dance. Because it’s so much a dance because you’re in a suit with a helmet on and gloves on and all these things that when it comes time to play, you have to kind of have a preconceived set of feelings and emotions to bring that thing to life. So I would listen to music similarly but I would listen to Hans Zimmer because I remember when he showed me the God of War soundtrack.

I was like “Holy shit!” Like this is something I could listen to because it reminds me of Hans Zimmer because it’s like the epic build-up and that very orchestral feeling because I felt like we were doing something epic like that. As for the physical training I give a shout out to Brian A Prince for introducing me to parkour because I’d always been a mover and a physical person but I’ve never seen someone in my height range do things like that. So as soon as I saw him do that the audition, I was in Vancouver. I was going to Origins Parkour to train so I was trying to foundationally learn like how to climb better. How to move more efficiently. How to move smoother. How to move lighter and anytime Brian came through town, we went over notes.

I’m like “Okay like how come we like step this game up?” Because Kevin and Ian – I mean like they set the foundation for where the character started. I was like “How can we as movers bring something new to these characters?” And that was really the seed that was planted where we started and so we would go like “Okay well maybe the emissaries, which I hope someday people see, I really wanted my character… he was more of a wily character. Like more of a shit disturber then like the proud stand up tall and so I really want to see it. We never really got to see any of the footage that they showed at the test screening before they changed it but I think there was a lot of like my character.

The stuff that I was really like hustling on, I put into that character but yeah so, I think my training regime was also an endurance thing. I wanted to make sure that my endurance was ready to do the suit work because I’ve done suit work before. I knew what was gonna be asked but I’ve never done it where I’m 100% covered so hands, feet, body, head and you can barely see, barely breathe. I knew that was going to be really challenging so I do a lot of meditation in my regular life anyways but I did a lot of meditation to be ready for the challenge that is performing while completely encumbered.

Aaron: Speaking of the suits then, I did want to ask you both what it was like performing inside those? I mean we spoke to Ian Feuer in the past who worked on Requiem when Ian Whyte wasn’t able to and he talked very specifically about how it was really taxing mentally because like you said it was all enclosed and claustrophobic and Brian, we even heard some reports that you were actually passing out on set in the suit?

Brian: It’s definitely the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life was wearing that suit and then doing stuff. Like we’re wearing this suit. If you’re just standing there, you’re working. So, like the animatronic head that I did the entire lab scene with. It’s 11 pounds in the back of your head right so it’s just trying to pull your head backwards and you’re fighting just to keep your head level right and so it’s kind of like that all over. Like just to lift the arm, you’re using all of your arm muscles to lift it just to walk around flexing everything to carry that tank around. Then on top of that you’re running, you’re fighting, you’re jumping and it’s tough because it’s this mix of like it’s exciting.

It’s super awesome. Like you walk out of the tent and then everyone sees you and freaks out. You push into it. You become that character and it’s super exhilarating but at the same time you have to be your voice. You have to tell people like “Hey I’m getting really tired” because all they see is the Predator. They don’t see a person that’s maybe out of sweat and yeah it was definitely like a really hard adaption process. I mean the stunt team, I trained with them for four weeks before we started shooting and we had me learning all my stuff in a wetsuit just to get used to like the sweat and the restriction of the movement. As helpful as that was even that just didn’t even come close to actually wearing the suit. Mainly for stunt days.

So, for stunts heavy days, we did a lot of wire work for this film and so for wire stunts, you wear something called a jerk vest or a harness and has all of these daisy loops all over it that you can like hook different pinpoints to. So usually typically for wire stunts, the vest gets cinched up right before you do the take. So you’re about to do a take, you cinch it all up, you get wired, you get hooked in and then your take’s over and over and over again and wire work by itself is immensely taxing and physically exhausting. So the Predators – I had to cinch up the harness before putting the suit on so I’m already full cinched up.

I’m like in a corset basically and it’s squeezing me fully and then I had to put on the suit and then I had to be in that suit for about six to eight hours depending on how long we were going and it was very painful but you endure. It’s the work and so on days like that when we’re in the harness and then on top of that I had to like run or jump in something. Words can’t explain how tremendously difficult those days were but you find a happy place, you find a way to keep yourself motivated and calm. Like as Kyle was saying I definitely practiced a lot of meditation habits.

I would just be sitting there in my own spot in my head. People on set would walk by and wave and I wouldn’t even see them because I would have to just be in this mental space of like “I’m fine. I’m chill. I’m here.” As for that day where I passed out, I mean we were walking up, we were doing this big scene as the emissaries which no one will see and we are walking up into the spaceship and we just did it a bunch of different times and essentially usually like when they call cut, there’s immediately fans on us. Just because like we can’t really even breathe in the masks or the head. That’s why I tell people it’s like any scene that I’m doing with battle masks on, I can’t see.

Like the goggles would fog up immediately so there’s like that iconic scene where I’m holding up Quinn McKenna like Boyd Holbrook’s character. I’m holding him up against the wall. When I had to come around him and grab him by the throat, that was basically like me. We had to rehearse to the point where I could do it with my eyes closed because I could barely see. A lot of sensory like deprivation but yeah that day where I passed out, we were going and going and going and going really hard. I was like “No I feel great. Let’s do it. I feel fine. I feel fine.” And then we kept going – we got to that last take and I was like “Oh my gosh. I’m going up this hill. I’m gonna need a break after this at the top.” Then I’m like on the floor because that’s the thing is like I needed to know where my limit was and I found it.

Kyle: So, like I said, I did this movie. I actually got to work with Robert Englund. It was a horror thing which I don’t think it turned out how we all wanted it to but that’s film. I wore a suit that was like I had arms and a head and something similar to like the Predator stuff but I had nothing on my legs and I remember that was like “Okay this is tough but I can handle this” but Predator… it wasn’t just that it was covering everything, it was also the way the suit is built because we had them custom-molded to our bodies. When we would stand there, if you didn’t move and you had your hands at your side, it was almost fine.

It was almost like a meditative thing but as soon as you like put your hands out sideways or hands up straight, it was like doing restrictive workout like as if you’re picking up a 10-pound weight and just holding it there. So anytime you didn’t move, it was very taxing so there was the scene where Brian passed out but it was on a day where we were doing a lot of movement. We had to walk into the entrance of the alien ship and it was like the big reveal where the whole loonies gang sees us and it was this really cool kind of intro to the emissaries. We had to walk up these stairs and up the ramp and then pretty much up about a two foot gap with our foot and then push up.

Pretty much like a workout and we did it about 10 times in a row and that was actually where it happened is because doing suit work you kind of have to find your flow. You have to communicate exactly where you’re at and the production is always trying to get as much done as possible because that’s just the way it goes and they’re going “Okay well let’s shoot, this shoot, let’s go, let’s keep the heads on. Actually guys we’re gonna shoot soon and we’re just doing the next set up so let’s keep the heads on” and there was that time I think we had it on for like an hour or something and when it’s on, all of the heat in your body is trying to exit out your hands and your head. So when it can’t do that, it’s coming out the only place exposed to air and that was like our mouth.

The heat would build up and the breath would build up and so that one we really found the limits of what was possible because I think me and Brian were really both strong performers and proficient athletes in that sense and it was taxing both of us to the maximum. Like it was really difficult because we had to always be “Water, water” and the team is there to help you but it’s annoying when you have to keep saying “Hey guys, can you please just come over with the fan and just stand here and blow it in my face for 40 minutes straight because as soon as you walk away we heat up to the point where it’s hard to see properly”.

So eventually they had some systems in place where we did this thing called the cool suit which would go underneath the suit and it was like a vest and it had little wires going through it where you could be sat down. The little plug would come out the side of your leg and they would plug you into actual cooler full of ice and water and it would pump in ice water. So, we would sit down in the chair. They plug us in to the cool suit. They’d have two people on the fans and we would just sit there in silence and just breathe and prepare so eventually they got good at letting us have the heads off until five minutes for shooting and they would go “Okay guys, heads on” and the heads would come on.

You’d be pretty much shooting right away but on that day before we had that system in place, we were just kind of winging it depending on what was happening in the day and be like “They can leave the heads on, it’s fine” and we’re like “No we’re heating up.” That was the day where there was some deterioration and from my perspective we walk up to the top of the thing and I look at Olivia in the face. I look at all the guys and I’m doing this performance and all of a sudden I feel this “Bump!” And I’m like what the fuck and I kind of in character turn around. I see him on the floor there’s this moment of silence that you could bite through and I look back at all of the crew and Shane standing there and everyone’s looking.

There was a silence in the air and then like as if someone just clapped everyone exploded running towards Brian. Running like “Oh my god, get his helmet off. Get Kyle out of the suit right now.” It got serious really quick and the first thing Brian says “Sorry guys”. I just burst out laughing because the only thing he could think about was like letting people down whereas we were being taxed and we were like “Hey guys we’re getting hot, we’re getting hot” and I almost think that had to happen to really show people how serious it is to play a character like that and by the way make sure your acting and make it real and sell it on top of just maintaining your sanity and keeping your body temperature down and staying hydrated. Making sure you go pee in between shots because no time is money. So yeah it was a lot and I would agree with Brian. It’s one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done.

Aaron: Did you guys not have the masks just velcroed on then? Were they not removable like in the originals or was it a full head thing with the mask on?

Brian: I mean the battle mask was usually zip-tied on but it had magnets which worked decently but the battle mask could come off and that would be more or less fine. When the animatronic mandible heads were on, those was a whole process to get them on and off.

Kyle: Yeah I think in both our sakes, they molded the head to our head so we had this little like cup inside that had a little snaps in it and you would put the head on. It wasn’t just a big floppy prosthetic head it was an actual cup inside that was fit to your skull shape so that when you moved the head would naturally move with you but there was two different types of heads. There was a stunt head and there was the animatronic head and the animatronic head had all the electronics to make the mouth move. So that was also another challenge is when the mouth is moving we don’t hear Shane going “Hey guys, okay, we want you to do this…” it was hard sometimes to get a performance out because someone would have to come right up to our face and go “Okay Brian or Kyle, okay we want you to kind of have a bit more energy and when you swipe make sure you change like this and do like this”. So yeah having the heads on was a lot of lip-reading.

Aaron: Do you guys remember the first scenes you actually worked on?

Brian: The first week was all the stuff in the school. We did like 14 days straight of night shoots. The first thing I did was I was on top of the RV and I was holding Augusto Aguilera’s character Nettles by one arm and pointing to the looneys to put down their guns. That was like the first bit and then we kind of finished that entire sequence over the next two weeks via like the Predator showing up at the school up until getting my head ripped off.

Kyle: First time for me was doing the Upgrade stuff in that scene and I also was they kind of brought me in because a lot of the stuff that we worked on was… we both want to have a lot of consistency with the characters so Lance brought me in to kind of be like “Okay well be with Brian so that everything you guys do we can kind of stay in the same level when we go to do the other part of their stuff” and me and Brian… it was pretty cool actually. We got to really personalize that character. I remember that first scene when he was holding up Nettles and there’s the whole finger-pointing thing. There’s a whole story behind that. We did a bunch of different versions because you’re trying to make it look natural.

Brian: I mean full disclosure, I had a full-on panic attack that night. I was super nervous. Like six months leading up among prep, you put the suit on. I was in there for hours and it restricted my breathing. I couldn’t feel anything. I was in like actual pain from the harness because I wasn’t used to it yet and then they went to put the head on and the mask head was messed up. So they had to get another one but so they took the stunt head which looks like the talking head and stuffed everything in and put the mask on and zip tied it to my face. I just had like a trigger and I just like started freaking out but I just covered it. Then I walked outside and then the goggles fogged up and I was just like “Okay this is fine, this is good.” I’m up holding up Nettles and like trying to point and it was a mess like in my head. Like outside it was fine. I can’t see so like my brain is just like “Oh, everyone is looking at me. I have no idea what I’m doing.”

Adam: Kind of going off that moment of where the Fugitive tells the group to put their weapons down to the ground, something we really liked about The Predator was that it felt like the Predators had a great sense of personality through the performance. So, what sort of conversations did you have with Shane about that sort of thing?

Brian: Shane definitely had notes. Like he was like “Oh I want him to feel like this” but I mean for the most part I honestly would give most of that credit to Kyle. Not to say that anyone else did input but they gave us a lot of freedom to be honest. They were just like “We want you guys to kind of bring to the table we want to do” and then they would obviously stop us or tell us like no less like that, more like this but it’s like a lot of that kind of came out in the beginning when we were in prep time. Kyle was like “Oh let’s try something like this”.

Kyle: For all of that being said, I go back to anyone asking me that this was a team effort. Everything that was done from the input I gave in, it was always a balance never between both of us because it’s not something that you could do alone. It’s just a crazy job so when we were doing that prep stuff, me and Brian would hang out. “How can we move? How can we run? How can we efficiently run?” I’m like “Brian when that camera gets close to your face you can’t be sad, you can’t be all of these things that we’re thinking that are happening in our moment right now. Let’s just turn that shit into anchor.”

I remember when we first saw the lab scene and it goes that tight shot when he wakes up and wakes up, I was like “YEAH!!!”. Everything I said, it was Brian like. He took that character and when I was watching the Fugitive do stuff, it was so uplifting that everything that we worked so hard to create for a personality came through because I’m reading all these reviews and going “You know what? I may or may not like the movie but man those Predators stuff looked amazing.” That was payoff because we both put in a lot of work and we would play together. “I’m the hunter now, Brian and I’m following to track prey. Okay the prey is attacking. How do we react?”

If we’re on set and you can’t talk to me, how am I know to follow you? There are a lot of things we could do and communicate to each other that don’t need to be said so if he turns and looks, I look and then he looks back and we have a moment and then we turn and go. There’s a lot of like acting where I guess yeah, we pretty much were just doing like all the active stuff before in the prep work which was like “How do we define the personality of who these characters are?”

Adam: So, you guys were given a lot of freedom in terms of the personality you were kind of developing that amongst yourselves for the Predator characters?

Kyle: Yeah it was hard to get time with Shane because there’s many moving parts happening at the same time. It was hard to say “Okay, Shane let’s sit down and talk”. He’s trying to manage the entire production so they would pretty much give us some notes and then we were just like “We were hired to do this so we have to trust that they hired us for a reason and we do our job”.

Aaron: So, let’s talk that fight sequence then between the Fugitive and the Upgrade. I mean we’ve got Brian in the suit and I’m assuming Kyle you’re in the stilts in the weirdo cap suit. So, what was that like to film?

Brian: That was crazy cuz we had to interact the best we could without interacting too. So, some miming but yeah that was definitely…

Kyle: For the stunt pad, what they showed in the final cut, there was way more fighting than that which I really wish they used. There was a scene where Brian sprints full speed and he’s like “Okay, Kyle, hold this cushion.” I think Lance it was kind of like a joke to him. He’s like “I want to see if Brian’s gonna knock over Kyle”. He was sprinting in the suit and just smash into this pad to make it look like he was crashing into the Upgrade and then he does a bunch of moves and the Upgrade blocks and there was way more of an interaction in terms of like fight moves. Then the final showed him kind of like swaying.

What we shot originally was Brian was running at me and while he was running at me, he was firing a burst out of his shoulder cannon. He wasn’t standing there. He was running and as he was running, attacking, he’s also slicing so it’s as if he was throwing everything, he had at him in the final sequence which I really wish I saw in the final product. In my head while we were doing it, I was like “This is gonna look so cool” but there was a lot of like stuff to make Brian look very physical. So he would run at me and hit a pad or when he was doing the attacks, he had to really kind of slash upwards at me and then I would kind of like go back and then I would mimic the swing backhand where he went flying.

Brian in that stunt where he gets backhanded, a wire pulled him 18ft in the air and he smacked into grass and under the grass they just put a little bit of moss but he actually flew in the air and smash into the grass and I remember that take – they were like “You really got to sell it” and when you did that and he hit and rolled, a bunch of the pieces flew off and broke from the armor and he rolled about two inches from the camera and they actually used that shot. Everyone grabbed their hands “Oh shit, oh shit he’s gonna hit the camera”. Everybody was like “Yep, that was it. That was the one”.

Brian: The first one, I hit the ground and like I hit the ground wrong and the bolts that held the skull piece that was like attached to my head and then like that connected that to the rest of the head like shattered and all I hear is this like shattering noise and I’m like “Oh I broke my neck. I’m dead.” And I’m laying there and like the part of the mask that was like falling was like stabbing me in the face. I wasn’t drawing blood but it was almost just like you could stab me in the face and then like we reset and they were just like “Hey man, you gotta hit your mark”. I was like “Alright you want me to hit my mark? Come and hit my mark!” And so, the second I did, I was hyped and I took the roll.

Adam: So, something that’s intrigued a lot of fans are those deleted Emissary Predators that you mentioned. You portrayed both of those and I was wondering if there’s anything else you could tell us about them and were you sad to see them go?

Brian: Definitely. There’s so many days guys… just amounted to nothing. I mean it’s for good reason. I’m not trying to be all like “I want it in”. I don’t feel like that at all. Whatever they did, they probably did it for a reason. I didn’t see the footage but in terms of like the performance aspect of it, we put a lot into the emissaries. We had a lot of fun doing them just cuz it’s like, exactly what Kyle was saying, so much of the prep time we spent doing this team-oriented training and then like getting to do that. To actually do that together was so cool and I’m definitely sad to see them go. We filmed a lot but it was a good chunk.

Kyle:  It was very action-packed the stuff that they did and I feel like there was a lot more subtlety in those characters because compared to the Fugitive The Fugitive – you seem him crash, a bunch of stuff happens and then he’s escaping so you see a lot of cool things but there was no time to really absorb like the character itself whereas the emissaries… there were a few more scenes… it’s almost like “Okay we’re introducing you the emissaries. Like here they are. Like here’s these characters doing this thing” and we did this stuff on the GPV which became kind of like a meme for the production because a lot of things went wrong with the vehicle that they purchased. So it had to be fixed on set and there was just a bunch of really tough days shooting those scenes and there was multiple stunts and some of the stunt guys that were working with the actors. They were falling off the GPV, jumping on the GPV. Like the thing was doing stunt maneuvers.

There was stunts where we had a Humvee blow up and flip in the air. There’s no CG in that thing you saw in the trailer. That was a guy driving a Humvee 70 km/hour and it got punched by a piston in the ground and flew 30 feet in the air, flipping and blew up while it was in midair. It was the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen and I was in the turret shooting at it when that happened. That’s actually what sets it off but we did a lot of the team-oriented Predator character work. It was done as the emissaries cuz we were these two guys that were on Earth and for all that, you were like “Oh what friendly Predators!”

Yeah, they were friendly. They’re essentially coming to Earth to give humans a fair fight. To give them a chance to fight back so when we do conquer them, there’s honor. It wasn’t like “Oh they’re here to help humans because they want to be pals”. It’s like no, that was never the intention from the way we interpreted the script so even in all of the character interactions between the Loonies and the Predators, there was stuff that had never been done in a Predator franchise.

It was hard to see it go because so much work, not just our parts but the actors at the scene and the crew. Everyone was putting their heart and soul into these scenes because we all knew like “Hey we’re bringing back the Predator franchise. We all got to just pull up our pants and get this shit done and do it properly”. So, I’m definitely sad to see it go because there was a lot of really like cool unique new takes on what Predators have done and what they were doing and the interaction between the Predators, the two that were me and Brian.

Aaron: Could you elaborate a bit more on the unique sort of stuff? What was in there that had not been done before?

Kyle: I think in the original script because people were looking like “Oh why don’t they have shoulder cannons”. I think they actually got knocked off and their first iteration coming to Earth and so what they were fighting with more of their traditional weapons like the things that fire out of their arm. The wires and the blades and all that kind of stuff and then they were using whatever was around which was the human weapons and there was a scene where I come out of the turret. I actually shot the 50 caliber turret which was actually one of the coolest things I’ve ever done in my life. They put actual 50 Cal shells in it.

They were essentially working together to take out the Upgrade. This upgrade was so badass that the Predators – the team up with the humans because he had all these crazy beasts like hunting animals with them. They showed the dogs but they had some other stuff that they were genetically creating. It was like a back-and-forth but they were spicing these things to be hunting animals that this Predator would bring with him to hunt these rebel Predators. So there was like this full-on war that was happening in these scenes where the Emissaries were… like I shot a 50 Cal and then I think Brian at one point shot a [M240] out the front and I pick up a gun I dropped –  an M240 and I turn and just go “POP! POP! POP!”

While the vehicle is driving mind you and I was just ripping at this thing flying through the trees and then turning around while this thing jumps on Coyle and taking my blades out and just stabbing it in the brain. It was stuff that Predator fans would have loved to see. It was really violent. All that character work that we put into the training was coming out in the Emissary guys. It was a large exhale to let that go because of how much the whole team put into making these scenes as cool as possible.

Adam: You had mentioned that you don’t remember it ever being called the Fugitive Predator as a nickname until you saw that online? Were there other nicknames that it was called on set?

Brian: On the call sheets, it was just Predator 1 and then Upgrade and then it was Emissary 1, Emissary 2. So, I didn’t know what they were gonna call the Fugitive one and then online people were like “Oh I love the Fugitive Predator”. I was like “Oh that’s cool”.

Aaron: That came from a company who made the figures. He was called the Fugitive and then the Upgrade was called the Assassin. So, speaking of the Assassin, I was just wondering if either of you knew if ADI or Shane Black had experimented with doing any practical suits for the Upgrade Predator or was it always gonna be still some mocap and CG?

Brian: I personally don’t know. I think it was always supposed to be CG. There was a really cool proxy like stand in maquette. That thing was really cool.

Kyle: I remember Shane’s first note. He did a little speech at the studio and he said “I really want this to be… like I make films. I make them like a family and everyone working, we work together. We trust each other and I really want to bring this franchise back and be as practical as possible”. So, he wanted to use everything in his power to make every effect he could practical but for the way the Fugitive was written, it was almost impossible to get it. There’s no 12-foot humans. Even on the stilts you couldn’t be very precise with how you moved so he said he wanted a person in it to do the proxy for most of the work but when the Fugitive would do something crazy like sprint, he had to CG that.

Brian:  Props to T.J. Storm. He was one of the other motion capture artists that did a lot of work in post for the Assassin and I wanted to throw his name out there really quick because he’s awesome.

Adam: Just for clarity’s sake, I don’t believe either of you were involved with the major reshoots that took place correct?

Brian: No that’s when I got worried. We heard about eight weeks of reshoots and neither of us were called and I was like “Something’s happening”.

Kyle: Once you’ve finished a job as an actor, you don’t really hear anything on the production side so we were kind of inquiring like “Hey, they’re not calling me for any reshoots” and I was like “Oh, man, what are they reshooting?” Eight weeks. That’s a sizable chunk.

Brian: The only reshoot I did – they flew me to LA for one day and I did a bunch of promo shoots. So, if you see like a lot of the social media marketing where it’s like kind of shots of the Fugitive and he’s like kind of posing, more like walking intimidatingly. We did a lot of that in LA in a single day. That was really fun.

Adam: You both attended the LA premiere of the film on the 12^th. Now that you’ve had a chance to see the finished film, what did you think of it?

Brian: It’s really hard to say honestly cuz I enjoyed it. A lot of fun watching it. It’s definitely like a really fun time and kinetic film but because we’re so ingrained with it, I was there from prep to the end. I was on set the entire time. I read the script three or four times and then what came out was… it was more or less a different film. I mean a lot of the elements were similar but like there were whole entire characters that were gone. There were whole entire sequences that were gone. There were things that linked to other things that had now just weren’t linked to anything. I’m not trying to be funny. Like no I wasn’t disappointed at all.

I mean I was sad that a lot of the stuff we did was taken out so that’s the business but at the same time it’s hard to say because it was a different movie and for what it was I definitely enjoyed it but I’ll always know what was going to be and it’s hard to not compare it to that. Do you know what I mean? I definitely enjoyed the film a lot. I had a lot of fun. My mom – she enjoyed it. I brought her to the premiere with me and part of me will always be like “Oh I want to see” and then there’s like the tiniest of pet peeves for me personally.

It’s like I went to school for visual storytelling. I can’t not film and think about the story of it. There’s this bit that they took out probably for time sake and I totally understand but they took out this clip where they show where they got the RV from. The Loonies have that RV. It’s a really fun scene and it makes the RV feel like this whole character but I get it. Like I’m not trying to say I could have done that job better. Nothing like that at all.

Aaron: Just for our listeners and so it makes sense and so you guys can tell me if it’s on par with what I’m saying. In the novelization for The Predator, they have the RV as having won it in a poker game with the bikers at the motel. It was like a weapon dealer or something who owned the RV and that’s why it was all stocked up?

Kyle: They opened the cabinets and guns were just falling out. That really gave his character… I felt like that scene missing took away from Alfie’s character. Because he learned a bunch of crazy card tricks for the film. He trained with some master card magician and learned a bunch of these things with Carlos and ended up smoking the guy. Yeah I really felt like that brought a lot to his character and that was a really fun scene that I completely agree with Brian is that some of the scenes that disappeared were like the connective tissue that explained who these characters were and where they came from and like what they were about.

So, I’m just gonna tie onto that cuz I don’t need to say my whole opinion on it. It was a lot and it was a different film in the end and what we started which is that I said, could be probably true for a lot of filmmaking. I was more focused on “We do the job we were hired for” so as I was watching, I was really looking “Did we fulfil what they wanted from the characters of the Predators” and I would say. So, I was satisfied that we brought characters to the screen. The rest is out of our control so I’m just kind of okay, that’s filmmaking. Let’s go. I had a good time. Everyone else had a good time. We did some cool character stuff.

Aaron: You’ll find that your guys’ sort of performances is something that’s been quite universally praised when it comes to the film. All other issues aside editing and whatever. So aside from the Emissary Predators, was there any footage of you guys specifically that ended up on the Edit Bay floor?

Brian: Honestly most of it made it in from what I did. The running made it in which I was really stoked about. That was really hard. It was the scene where I ran in front of the bus. There was a little tiny parkour, little vault I did in the lab escape sequence that got cut out but it probably didn’t sell but apart from that though, I’m stoked with everything else that made it in personally.

Kyle: I loved Brian’s performance. There was a cool little story attached to it where Lance, the stunt coordinator, gave us kind of an opportunity to do some like visualizing for the lab escape scene where he comes around the corner and this comes back to that acting thing where I’m like “Yeah we picked up a human gun. We wouldn’t react like a human cuz we’re this massive Predator and we have so much mass – the gun would almost be like a toy to us.

We pick it up. We shoot it and toss it aside” and when I saw how good it looked on film when Brian came around the corner and he’s like escaping and walking like he doesn’t give a shit. He slays the guy, picks up his gun and the way he swept his arm and shot the guys and then pretty much let go of the gun in the same swing. Probably one of the most direct training to final product moments because we were like “Yeah we want these little details to be real. Like look we don’t shake when he shoots again. He just tosses aside, smashes the glass. He’s not gonna sit there and finick with like trying to shoot tactically. It’s not his weaponry”. So that was really cool to see.

Aaron: Could you feel the recoil in the suits?

Brian: That one particularly that I whip up – that one was a prop gun but when we shot the big ones like the M240 and the 50 Cal had the recoil. I’m gonna give a lot of props to Kyle. Actually, so he’s like walking around holding the M240 and it’s a heavy gun man. He’s in the suit so he has to look like “Oh no this is light” but to hold heavy and then try to like play it off – that’s really difficult.

Aaron: So, Brian, when you’re not dressing up and slaughtering folk, you keep busy with art. Would you ever want to work with Dark Horse on a Predator comic illustrating?

Brian: That’s a tough question. Predators are hard to draw man. I don’t know. No that would actually be really cool. I would totally love to do something like that in the future especially when my plate clears up right now. This graphic novel is taking up all of my time but no definitely one day, I would love to do like a little Predator like mini comic or something like that but the thing is it’s like I’m so weird that like I wouldn’t even want to do like a… like no one would want to read my Predator comic because it’d be like a sitcom or something with the Predator being like “Oh man I’m out of milk, I need to get some milk”.

Adam: Now that it’s all said and done would either of you like to return someday and portray the Predator in another film?

Kyle: Oh yeah, I’d love to get a chance to work in with Brian because like that was just the start of what we can create now. Seeing what is possible. Oh my god. I would love to come back and play.

Brian: Yeah, I feel the same way. It’s like a definite yes. Like for as much as we like to explain to people how like difficult and taxing certain things were, it’s just like it was so fulfilling of an experience and I’d say yes in literally a second if somebody asked me to do it.

Adam: So just before we finish, was there anything you guys don’t want to share? Any anecdotes or anything that we haven’t given you the opportunity to say?

Brian: Yeah, I want to say two more things. One I wanted to give a special super awesome shoutout to the Predator special effects makeup team. Heather [Tillson], Mike [Larrabee], Tibor [Farkas], Geoff [Redknap] and there were others too that came and just they were the ones that helped us get dressed. They were the ones that kept us hydrated. Mike would paint the suit every day to keep it looking pretty and they just seriously were kind of like the ones that kind of kept us going and I really can’t thank them enough because it’s a team effort. Like yeah, they were definitely part of it and then obviously special thanks to like the stunt team and the crew. Especially the crew. It’s a huge ship of people that worked on this thing and everybody deserves to get the credit for it.

Kyle: I couldn’t really say anything more than that. I really would like to double up that our special effects team not only did they keep the suit intact but they kept our minds intact. When we needed someone to go to bat for us, to make sure we were having our needs met it was people like Mike and Geoff. They were they’re always there no matter what to make sure that we were as comfortable we could be to do our jobs and the whole crew too. Like there wasn’t one person I met on that set that wasn’t stoked to be there. So as much as I’d like to say yeah everyone kills their performances. It’s a team effort and it only can become something amazing with the team effort.

You can find Kyle Strauts on Twitter @geno604 and on Instagram @actorkylestrauts. Brian A. Prince can be found on Twitter @thebaprince and Instagram @thebaprince.