INDYCAR
Austin Butler and Jodie Comer are going back to the ‘60s in their new film “The Bikeriders,” inspired by a 1967 photography book of the same name.
“Extra’s” Melvin Robert spoke with Austin and Jodie about “The Bikeriders,” which follows the rise of a midwestern motorcycle club, the Vandals, into the dangerous underworld of violence.
For the movie, Austin had to learn how to ride a motorcycle in a pack, something he hadn’t done before. He said, “We were very fortunate to have Jeff Milburn… He was sort of the head of the motorcycle department and he knew the importance of us practicing that very early and so we all got together and we started in a parking lot… See how tight you can make turns, how slow you can make a turn, how fast you can make a turn… You just kind of play around for a while and get in a pack and have somebody lead and you just try to stay as close as you can… It feels like a formation.”
His role also gave him a chance to connect more with his family. He said, “My dad and my grandpa both have such a love of motorcycles so it was cool to sort of connect to them through this process.”
While he was filming “Elvis,” Austin became friends with someone, who restored Harleys and they started riding together.
He shared, ‘There was a guy named Cohen, who had a coffee shop… He always had these cool motorcycles and trucks outside and we became friends and hit it off. He said, ‘You want to come by my motorcycle shop?’ and he fixed up all these incredible old Harleys… They were just really special bikes and we went out riding and that was fun.”
For the movie, Comer adopted a unique accent for her character Kathy, who didn’t have a typical Chicago accent.
To help her prep for the role, Comer had access to “30 minutes of audio” of the real-life Kathy Bauer. She said, “It was amazing, you know, because immediately I was like, ‘Oh, my God, who is this woman? She was just so full of life and charisma and like really made me laugh and was kind of honest and brazen… She’s from North Chicago but like when I started working with my dialect coach, Victoria. Victoria, was like, ‘Every vowel sound is a contradiction… Do you want to do a generic Chicago or do you want to emulate this audio?’ I was like, ‘I want to do the audio.’”
Comer is an accent queen, who has done Italian, German, Spanish, French, English, and many more for her role as Villanelle in “Killing Eve.”
When Melvin raved about her accents, Austin chimed in, saying, “Isn’t she [awesome]?”
Jodie stayed humble, admitting that there are “so many” accents she can’t do like Welsh.
“The Bikeriders” is told through Comer’s character. She described it as an “amazing ensemble piece,” adding, “It’s aesthetically so beautiful. It’s a Jeff Nichols movie so it’s character driven to the core… It just has such an energy to it… It’s so quintessentially American. It definitely has this element of nostalgia.”
Jodie and Austin recently took a trip to the Indy 500, where they promoted the film and felt the pressure serving as the honorary starters!
Comer was “terrified of dropping the flag” so she watched video of her “The Last Duel” co-star Adam Driver waving the green flag last year. She said, “‘I was like, ‘I need to see how it’s been done before.’ He just looked incredibly confident and just went for it, so I was like, ‘maybe, that’s the trick.’ We got a lot of kind of pointers throughout the day, which terrified us even more.”
Austin added, “They told us so many things that never came to fruition… once we were up there, it was a totally different experience. It was magical… some of the things I was worried about was they said, ‘it’s rare that they have two people doing it so if you hit your flags together, one of you may drop it. They’re going 240 mph… so you don’t want to hit them with the flag so I felt pressure in that way, but it turned out great.”
“The Bikeriders” is out June 21.