Interview With Kyle Gallner, Star Of ‘The Passenger’ (2023)

When I was sent the trailer for Carter Smith’s (read our interview with him HERE) new directorial project, The Passenger, I was sold. Starring a phenomenal Kyle Gallner (read our other interview with him HERE) in a role that fits him like a glove, and Johnny Berchtold (Tiny Beautiful Things – 2023) as the tender loner Randy, The Passenger, written by Jack Stanley, expertly blends violence and dealing with unresolved trauma into a heartbreaking story that kept me on the edge of my seat the entire time. It’s safe to say that this is probably my top film of 2023.

I was lucky enough to chat with Kyle about why he wanted to play Benson, building his character, horror movies and more!

**This interview contains mild spoilers**

PopHorror: I’m super excited to talk about The Passenger. During the strike, I watched this and What Comes Around, and those two roles are two of the best roles you have ever done. I was blown away by both of them.

Kyle Gallner: I’ll take that all day.

PopHorror: I read a review today for a recent film you did called Strange Darling, and they called you a modern horror icon. What do you think about that?

Kyle Gallner: I think it’s cool. I don’t think you can take it any other way than compliment, right? It’s neat. As an actor, it’s hard to know what your path will be and where you’ll go. I’ve done a bunch of stuff that isn’t horror, but there’s just something about the horror community that really celebrates their own. They celebrate the actors and their film, and they really stick by the people in their community, and I really felt a lot of love from the horror community for a long time, maybe other than A Nightmare on Elm Street. But other than that…

PopHorror: Oh, I forgot you were in that!

Kyle Gallner: But other than that, it’s cool and that’s kind of something that’s only popped up in the last year or so. It was surprising but it’s been a lot of fun to ride that wave because there’s so much film that gets made that’s almost like thankless in a way because – not that we need pats on the back – but what I mean is there’s so much stuff that you can make something that nobody sees. But horror continues to be the thing that if you make it, people find it and it’s cool to have that because you’re making something that you know people will watch and you hope will enjoy.

PopHorror: You make a lot of indie films and I do feel that indie films get lost in the shuffle a lot.

Kyle Gallner: Sure.

PopHorror: Sometimes they don’t get released, sometimes they don’t make it out of festivals. They don’t get as much advertising or promotion as mainstream, so those indie films do kind of fly under the radar. But the good thing about horror is that there are so many film festivals that are dedicated just to the genre that really let those films shine. The horror community, while it’s pretty big, is still kind of small and everybody seems to know everybody or knows someone who knows someone. I think that helps get them in front of people and get more views. 

Kyle Gallner: Yeah, which is great, and I’ll continue to just make all kinds of stuff hopefully and continue to make horror movies too. I think it’s a fun world to play in. I think it’s a fun thing to do and to be a part of. I think maybe when I was younger there was more of a stigma about horror. I don’t think it was as appreciated or respected, at least within the upper tiers of the film industry or whatever you want to say. There was almost like an elitist nose turned up at it, which I think is bullshit because I think it’s been one of the biggest and most effective genres since forever. But now it’s totally celebrated and looked at in a different way. I think maybe when I was a little younger I was hesitant to do so much of it, but now it’s like there’s no rules. Which is great because now you don’t really have to… If something gets you going and you’re like, “Dude, I want to do this,” you don’t have to be like, “Well, what are the repercussions?” You can really just go make these movies and people aren’t as weird about it anymore which I think is great, and I think it’s allowed for A) some truly interesting movies to be made, and B) you’re now seeing some huge mainstream actors crushing it in horror movies, which I think is really cool.

PopHorror: We’re seeing a lot of mainstream actors do indies lately, which is awesome.

Kyle Gallner: Yeah! Well, I think it’s so tough. It’s like you look at the state of the film industry and it’s a really weird place, I think. I think we’ve hit this point of like, why are we only making studio films for like five hundred million dollars? It’s almost like crippling things a little bit, so you get these cool indie films, and these people get to go play in these different worlds and these interesting worlds, that it’s almost like we need to find this happy medium of the two. I mean obviously still make these smaller budget indie stuff and make bigger budget movies, but there’s got to be a happy medium somewhere.

PopHorror: I totally agree. So, about The Passenger, what intrigued you about the script and made you want to be a part of the project?

Kyle Gallner: It all starts with the script, right? There was something incredibly interesting about Benson on the page. You watch the movie and Benson monologues a lot. The guy has a lot to say.

PopHorror: He does!

Kyle Gallner: There’s a challenge there. How do you keep that interesting? How do you keep that in a place where people don’t just roll their eyes every time this guy opens his mouth? So I thought that was an interesting challenge. Also, there was just something so great about the relationship between Benson and Randy, where it was like this great exploration of platonic male love, in a way, under such crushing circumstances. And I thought that was very cool, watching these two people who have been hurt in their own way, and they’re going through their own thing that even in such an insane situation, there was this sort of… I don’t know if Randy totally had it for Benson until maybe the end. Benson really took to Randy. There was this love for this kid that he just really wanted to help him in his own fucked up way. It doesn’t excuse the horrible things that he’s done by any means, but exploring that sort of mindset and digging into that kind of character I hadn’t really ever gotten to do before. I found it incredibly interesting, like mining for the humor in these weird places and trying to figure out what the emotional connection was between Randy and Benson and building Benson’s backstory. You get hints of it in the film and I got to take it from there. There was just so much world building to be done and so much good shit in the script, and then I was a big fan of The Ruins and I think Carter’s incredibly talented.

PopHorror: He is!

Kyle Gallner: I got to talk to him too, before everything kicked off, and I just loved what he said. He came from such a great place. It was really one of those things where it was just a winning combination for me that excites me as an actor. There was just so much there as an actor that I was like, “This is like a feast!”

PopHorror: I’m glad you brought up the relationship between Benson and Randy because it’s unconventional, but they’re on the verge of a weird friendship. Maybe if it was different circumstances, they would have been friends. I did talk to Carter about this movie and how Benson is obviously going through something in this movie. There’s obviously unresolved trauma. But he is more interested in helping Randy with his problems. I hate using the word “trauma” because I feel like it’s overused but I can’t think of any other word to use to describe it.

Kyle Gallner: I think it’s the correct word to use here, for sure.

PopHorror: He’s more concerned with helping Randy with the trauma from the incident with his teacher. I really liked the relationship between them. One thing that Carter and I also talked about is that we really didn’t expect to like Benson as much as we did. Yeah, he’s a horrible person, but you really feel for him too.

Kyle Gallner: I think that’s also something that really interested me as an actor. I was like, this is a challenge. This either goes right or it goes wrong. People either relate to Benson in some way and even feel for Benson in some way, or if I don’t do my job, this is a waste of time and people fucking hate this guy. It is an interesting relationship. It really is. I think Benson knows it’s over. I think Benson knows there’s no helping him. The kid was doomed from the jump. You see it in his home life. You see it in his past life. You see it in everything that I think Benson came up with a way of coping with that sort of trauma or neglect or all of the things that happened in his life. The way he did it was very outward in the way he dresses. There’s almost like this, “Come fuck with me, I dare you” attitude, even in the way he wears his clothes. It’s where I think some people shrink into the background, other people come out swinging. And that’s Benson.

PopHorror: And that sweater!

Kyle Gallner: And that sweater, yeah! A hundred percent. I think that’s Benson. That’s how Benson dealt with his stuff. Benson went to war with the world. I think that’s how Benson coped. He sees Randy and I believe he spots something in Randy that he has not reached that tipping point yet. There’s something I can save, there’s something I can help, there’s something I can do to keep him from ending up like a version of me. And I think in a way, when he walks out and makes that choice to walk back into the burger place, Benson knows that this is a scorched-earth mission. There’s no coming back. I think towards the end he starts to panic a bit, for sure, but I think in his mind at that moment, it’s over. It’s over for him. There’s probably no good way this ends other than maybe helping Randy, and he goes about it in probably the most fucked up way imaginable, but in a way that he thinks is going to help this kid.

PopHorror: There’s obviously something deeper within Benson, something psychological. We kind of get a glimpse of it but we never really know what it is, and it really results in some unhinged violence on his end. Was there anything that you were adamant about bringing to the character?

Kyle Gallner: Yeah, actually it was not written that I killed Mr. Sheppard, and I went to Carter and I was like, “I need to beat him to death. He needs to be killed. I need to come at this guy. What this guy did to me needs to be so bad that I kill him in that parking lot.” And he was like, “Yeah, great. Let’s do that.” And he really was like, “Yeah, that makes sense.” There was a lot of discovery as we were going. I would discover things with Benson as we were going. And the violence in that scene was a conversation that was like, “I want this to be at an 11. I want this to be so violent. I want him to…” Because it’s the moment where you watch Benson get shaken. What he’s doing to Randy, trying to force Randy to face his demons, he is literally facing, without it being planned, he’s face to face with his own. It shakes him up. That’s sort of the beginning of the end, right? All of a sudden the bravado and the confidence is a little off. It’s now a little more unhinged and you realize that Benson is not invincible by any means. Whatever he has pushed down has come up and now he’s having to deal with it in real time while having to deal with Randy, and that was something that I was pretty adamant about. I was like, we need to kill Shappard. He has to die. That beating has to be so bad that he doesn’t survive it.

PopHorror: That was a pretty intense scene too.

Kyle Gallner: Yeah, that was a day. That was a fucking day, for sure. And that stunt guy, he was great. He was like, “Just throw it. Let’s go!” He was all for it. It was one of those things. Those stunt scenes are usually like, “Alright, you hit him three times and he goes down.” And it was like, “I want to hit this guy like 15 times. I just want to be whaling on him.” And everybody was like, “Yeah, let’s do that!” It was nice. It really was a collaborative set and I feel like Carter truly allowed us to have ownership over these characters and trusted us when we felt something or wanted to try something. He had such a great grasp on the script and these characters as well that it was like this kind of crazy symbiotic thing between the three of us. It really was special. It was a very unique experience.

PopHorror: I have to know. The sweater. Would you say it’s yellow or green?

Kyle Gallner: The way I’d describe it is you skinned the Grinch. It looks exactly if I fucking skinned the Grinch. That color, it’s the Grinch. And they made it. There’s like three in the world.

PopHorror: I have had several conversations about this, and I say it’s yellow. Everyone is wrong because it’s yellow.

Kyle Gallner: It’s a weird color. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. I have one. I have one in my closet.

PopHorror: It works.

Kyle Gallner: It did, and that’s what I mean. Benson’s loud in every sense of it. Everywhere he goes, he’s almost like challenging everyone and everything. It’s like, “Yeah, come talk to me about my fucking cardigan. I dare ya!”

PopHorror: I don’t think it would have been the same if he was wearing a black one, or a red one, or blue. There’s something about that odd color that was the perfect pairing.

Kyle Gallner: That’s Carter, man. He’s got such a good eye and he’s so smart about stuff. That was his idea dying it that color. It was him and wardrobe, they worked together and came up with that amazing thing. And that bunny t-shirt they made, and that metal band t-shirt they made. They made everything.

PopHorror: We’ve talked about the heavy themes this film deals with. What do you hope people walk away with after watching it?

Kyle Gallner: Man. You just never know what someone’s been through, or what someone is going through. Pain and things like that can be invisible. You can never just assume something about anybody.

PopHorror: I agree. You never know. And mental health is definitely something that is feared by a lot of people, I think. So, to see something like this, I think it’s going to be very eye-opening.

Kyle Gallner: Yeah, I think it’s a very intense approach to it, but I think it’s a pretty unique approach to it. That diner scene is so visceral and intense and they showed some of it in the trailer but I think people expected it to be more of a horror movie.

PopHorror: Yes, I thought it was going to be a horror movie.

Kyle Gallner: There’s so much more to it than just being this rampage on the road. You’re really watching these two guys go through some shit.

PopHorror: It takes you by surprise.

Kyle Gallner: And go through it together.

PopHorror: Now that the strike is over, what is up next for you?

Kyle Gallner: Hopefully some auditions. Strange Darling will come out at some point I’m assuming. I don’t know. I’m waiting to hear news on that. But yeah, really just looking to get back to work, as are a lot of us. I’d say most of us. A couple of things that I’m trying to get off the ground myself. One with a buddy, some things like that so hopefully that will happen at some point. It’s incredibly hard to get anything made so it’s like while I’m trying to get other people to hire me, I might as well try to make my own stuff as well.

PopHorror: One last question for you today. What would be your weapon of choice in a zombie apocalypse?

Kyle Gallner: Weapon of choice in a zombie apocalypse… Goddammit, you want something quick. I over analyze this. Bullets run out, but a baseball bat may take a lot. A sword goes dull. I don’t know, maybe a metal bat. I think a metal bat would be the way to go.

PopHorror: I will go with a machete because it not only gives me distance from the zombie, but also can be used for other things like getting food, chopping small pieces of wood.

Kyle Gallner: Alright, I change my answer. I think that’s good. I’m going with a machete. I think a machete is the answer, you’re right. As long as you can sharpen it, a machete is the way to go.

Thank you so much to Kyle for taking the time to speak with us. The Passenger is now available to rent and on MGM+.