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The truth about Ryan Coogler‘s reboot of The X-Files is out there. Just don’t look for it around star Danielle Deadwyler. We at Den of Geek did our best to get something out of her when she came to promote her new movie The Saviors at SXSW, but Deadwyler wouldn’t budge.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Deadwyler insists. “I can’t answer none of your questions.” Sharing our frustration is Kevin Hamedani, who directs Deadwyler in the new comedy thriller The Saviors. “I have begged her to give me a crumb, a sign—something!” he laughs, all to no avail. Danielle Deadwyler is committed to saving the surprise of the new series.
In that way, she’s much like her character in The Saviors. Directed by Hamedani, who co-wrote the script with Travis Betz, The Saviors stars Deadwyler and Adam Scott as Kim and Sean, a suburban couple who rents their garage to a pair of siblings from the Middle East, Jahan (Nazanin Boniadi) and Amir (Theo Rossi). As Sean begins to investigate their new guests, he enters a spiral of conspiracy that affects everything, not least of which, his troubled marriage.
That combination of mundane problems and strange happenings allows Deadwyler to keep Kim grounded in a type of reality, a process she was willing to discuss with Den of Geek.
“Compounding these real problems helps you understand that the political is so personal that it seeps into the very fabric of your being,” she explains. “The way you engage with the person who you purport to love in any capacity shifts the way that you treat others outside of your domestic space. So it’s a matter of how you treat yourself, how you think you actually are in relationships, including the internal relationships that are slightly outside of you.
“You have that self, and then you have family, and then you have everyone outside of that. It’s challenging: who we are as people, who we think we are, who we show beyond the border of our selves, and who we show beyond the border of who we are in our diving home space.”
Challenging borders has always been a theme in The Saviors, ever since Hamedani began working on the script a decade ago as what he calls “a couple hundred grand little indie film in my dad’s backyard.” However, The Saviors started moving quickly toward production… at first. “Suddenly, this little script was making rounds around town, and it got on the Black List. And so it seemed to be going really fast at the start,” Hamedani recalls. “But casting and financing, as every indie filmmaker can tell you, is a slow process, and then you’re scheduling actors, and then we had COVID, and then we had the strike.
“The stars have to align, where all your actors are in LA for a month, and you have to run and gun it. When we found that window, we went for it, after 10 years.”
For better or for worse, the themes of The Saviors haven’t grown less relevant over the past decade.
“It’s a little haunting and tragic,” observes Hamedani. “You know, there was a period in those 10 years when I thought the world had changed a bit, and maybe we should focus on a different project. And then the world changed again, and suddenly The Saviors is even more timely, unfortunately.
“But I think that highlights that the mistrust between cultures and fear of your neighbor will continue to persist. It’s not a timely thing. It’s just who we are as human beings, and it highlights that we should continue to tell these stories more and try to understand your neighbor a bit better and realize we’re not all that different. As corny and cliché as that might sound, it’s the fundamental problem going on right now, even before we started writing the script.”
Hamedani’s choice of setting further helps that timelessness, as The Saviors takes place in a nondescript neighborhood. “It’s suburban America,” he says. “It’s not Seattle, where I’m from, although that plays a role in constructing the world through my experiences. It’s suburbia in America.”
No one understands that tension between reality and imaginary better than Rossi, who must play Amir both as he is and as his neighbors perceive him. “I’m a lunatic, so it’s kind of easy to differentiate the personalities,” he quips, before turning to the specifics of his craft.
“It’s just preparing more than one character. You’re preparing what version you’re going to show to the people you’re reacting to within the moment. So to Kim, he’s one version of himself. To his sister, he’s another version. And then there’s the version that wants to do the mission, do the thing he needs to do. So what face are you going to show?
“It’s a type of code-switching, kind of what we all do one way or another in our lives. We’re different versions of ourselves for different scenarios that we’re in. His is just on a really high level, so I just looked at it by asking who I was in a scene and just broke it down like that.”
As Rossi’s comments suggest, The Saviors is a twisty thriller that keeps the audience guessing. In fact, it kept the stars guessing too. “I think what Kevin and Travis did so brilliantly was make a film that keeps swerving one way and then another,” Rossi observes before admitting his own moment of recognition. “When I was reading it, it was a shock at the end. I just thought to myself, ‘What is happening?’”
Deadwyler initially says she also didn’t see the last twist coming, before turning to something more mystical.
“There’s a dream sequence in the movie that indicated the truth to me,” she recollects. “I love dreams. I’m attached to dreams. Dreams are an indicator of things to me, they are admonitions to our waking life. So when we hit this surreal moment while getting to wherever the hell we get to at the end of the film, I know that a dream is an undercurrent of something that’s going to happen. One of the things that first drew me to the film was the way it toyed with the dream world in its storytelling.”
So will dreams be a big part of the investigations the FBI agents do in the new version of The X-Files? We don’t know, and Deadwyler isn’t saying, but we want to believe.
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