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Gaten Matarazzo doesn’t know what Stranger Things fans will make of his new flick Pizza Movie, but he’s pretty sure their parents will like it a lot less. “They’ll be like ‘oh, Dustin’s in this!’ And then, uh oh…” he tells Den of Geek at SXSW, before co-director Brian McElhaney interjects with “Uh oh, he’s screaming the C-word over and over!”
Pizza Movie is definitely a wild change of pace for Matarazzo. Many people still associate him with the sweet but courageous Dustin Henderson in Netflix’s hit horror series, but this new project sees Matarazzo’s Jack, along with his best friend Montgomery (The Goldbergs star Sean Giambrone) swerving Demogorgons and Mind Flayers to take on a very different kind of quest, as they attempt to descend just two flights of stairs to pick up a pizza after taking some random pills called M.I.N.T.S.
The quest becomes a surreal, mind-bending nightmare as they encounter obstacle after obstacle. Having not observed the drug’s rules properly, they’ll suffer the worst of it until they chase it up with a pizza. Unfortunately, one of the side effects of the drug is being confronted by your worst nightmare, and the cast divulges their own, ranging from “war,” to “sharks with human legs,” to just “sharks.”
“I’m not scared of sharks, I don’t know why I said that,” wonders Matarazzo aloud suddenly, adding, “I even swam with sharks!”
Though Jack and Montgomery haven’t exactly reached the heights of popularity in Pizza Movie when the M.I.N.T.S. kick in—and there’s a hilarious sequence at the start of the film that drives this home—Giambrone counters that he is actually an alpha in real life, before being challenged to do 20 push-ups on the spot in the Den of Geek studio. Incredibly, he does, to cheers from the cast, including scream queen Lulu Wilson, who plays the duo’s old pal Lizzy.
Wilson is taking a well-earned break from the ghosts of Hill House and the violent intruders of the Becky movies in this new comedy, and she couldn’t be happier. She says she still got to flex her genre muscles during the film’s “bad trip” moments, describing the project itself as a dream come true. “The second I got this script, I was determined to book the role of Lizzy,” she tells us. “I’m still pinching myself that I’m here.”
Meanwhile, La Brea star Jack Martin plays the villain of the piece, a strict college RA who is taking his job way too seriously. “They let me be the biggest psychopath of all time,” he says gleefully. “Not a big stretch,” jokes McElhaney. “Jack kinda is the biggest psychopath of all time.”
BriTANicK comedy duo McElhaney and Nick Kocher say they first had the idea for Pizza Movie in college, but didn’t flesh it out until much later. They’ll “plead the fifth” on whether specific characters or stories are based on anything from real life, but say that “Everyone’s ordered food when they’re not fully sober and found it difficult, so yes, we got high and ordered pizza. This has happened to us.”
Pizza Movie will be streaming on Hulu from April 3, 2026.
The post Gaten Matarazzo Follows Up Stranger Things With the Mind-Bending Pizza Movie appeared first on Den of Geek.
