Interview With Matt Mercer And Josh Ethier For ‘Jimmy And Stiggs’

Jimmy and Stiggs, written and directed by Joe Begos and starring Joe and Matt Mercer, is a neon-drenched, drug-induced fever nightmare of an alien abduction movie, and I wouldn’t expect anything less from Joe (read our other interviews with him HERE and HERE). Joe is fairly new to the filmmaking game, having released his first feature film, Almost Human, back in 2013, but since then he’s blown our minds with Bliss and VFW, both in 2019, my favorite, Christmas Blood Christmas in 2022, and now this blood-soaked homage to Dead Alive and Bad Taste packed with practical effects, Jimmy and Stiggs. What started as a Covid project filmed solely in his own apartment with a crew of friends, Jimmy and Stiggs just wrapped up a theater tour of the country and announced a merchandise line exclusively at Hot Topic.

A perfect storm of lousy news sees out-of-work filmmaker Jimmy Lang spiral into a bender, during which he claims to have been abducted by aliens, and fearing their return, he contacts his old friend Stiggs to help him gear up for war.

To celebrate the release of the film, I chatted with producer Josh Ethier (who also had a bit part) and producer/star Matt Mercer about how they met Joe, working with friends, horror movies, and more!

PopHorror: Jimmy and Stiggs was so much fun. 

Matt Mercer: Thank you.

PopHorror: It reminded me of Evil Dead and Dead Alive.

Matt Mercer: Oh, hell yeah!

PopHorror: Especially the scene with the fan blades and all the blood.

Josh Ethier: Everyone on this movie was huge fans of those movies. We either grew up watching or we still watch them together in 2025, 30 years later.

Matt Mercer: Those movies are just internalized for all of us. I think anything we make, some element of that is going to come out, for Joe and Josh and me.

PopHorror: I love that. I know that you guys are really good friends with Joe, and my first question is for both of you. How did you both become involved with the project?

Matt Mercer: Yeah, I’ve known Joe for a long time. I met Joe because I had produced a movie years and years ago called Contracted, which Josh edited. That’s how we all met, and then Joe cast me in his second movie, The Mind’s Eye, so I was an actor in that, and then because I had some producing background as well, when they made their third feature, because Joe and Josh are producing partners, Bliss, I produced that with Josh. Learned a lot doing that. I’m like a multi-hyphenate for the Channel 83 production team. I was Josh’s assistant editor on VFW, I produced and acted in this movie, Jimmy and Stiggs, in Christmas Bloody Christmas I showed up to die, basically. That’s really how we met and also, we all just hang out. We live fairly close to each other and we like the same kind of movies, like the ones you just brought up, so we suet hang out and watch movies. It’s like friends making a movie.

PopHorror: I just want to throw in there that Christmas Bloody Christmas is one of my favorite Christmas horror movies. I love Christmas horror. It’s something I watch every year now. 

Matt Mercer: Yeah!

Josh Ethier: Joe and I, we’ve been friends since high school. We both grew up in the same small town, Coventry, Rhode Island. We met in ninth grade and just started making short films, hanging out and watching movies together. Originally, we had a small group of friends that we were making all these shorts with on the weekend, and we were like, “We’re going to move to LA! We should all go!” And then guy number four dropped out and then guy number three dropped out, so it was just Joe and I moving out here. But we lived together for years. This is our sixth film together. Both, I guess, fifth and sixth, because Christmas came out in the middle of it, because we were making this one for so long. Like with all of Joe’s films, he would just send it over to me and say, “This is what I’m writing, this is what I’ve been working on, this is what I’ve been thinking.” And immediately, it was like, “Well, who’s Stiggs? Can you get Matt?” Because we all live like a quarter of a mile from each other. It’s the perfect microcosm of weird creators that are down to do something fun and interesting in their free time. So, yeah, that’s what set it off was just Joe wanted to make a movie where he was seeing a lot of Zoom films, he was seeing folks at home with GoPros making shorts or making features and stuff. His first thought was like, man, I have 16mm gear in the house, I’ve got two cameras, and all my friends know how to make movies, and we all live a quarter of a mile from each other. His intention was, we could do something that was bolder and weirder because we have all of this built-up film education together, so that’s how it started.

Matt Mercer: It was also helpful, since it was started as a made-in-the-pandemic movie, we started shooting right when the first vaccine came out so we could all get vaccinated and we were so close to each other, we just created our own pandemic bubble, basically.

Josh Ethier: We were going for about a year before that, anyway, watching movies, eating Doritos.

Matt Mercer: It was like, eh, let’s add making a movie to this group.

Josh Ethier: I think it was about three months into the pandemic when people started forming their own bubbles and everything. We immediately got a 70-inch pizza and watched all of the Children of the Corn films one day.

PopHorror: That’s dedication.

Josh Ethier: It was a lot. There’s a lot of good ones in there but there’s a few towards the end that nod off. So, we were already basically doing that anyways, so we said why not? We’ll just roll camera on it.

PopHorror: Matt, was it always planned for you to star as Stiggs?

Matt Mercer: Yeah, I think from the start it was because that was kind of piggybacking off of what we were just talking about. I live close and I wasn’t an actor that they had to bring into town or strike some kind of special deal with. I was just gung-ho to jump in and be a part of it, and I’ve known them a long time. I know how Joe works and even though we couldn’t have fathomed how long we were going to shoot on this movie, it’s very much like Evil Dead in terms of how long it took us to make it, or Bad Taste, those years long handmade movies from back then. I was just available and love this kind of stuff, so I was willing to dive in and do all of the goopy, crazy stuff as well as my own stunts. I was asked from the start, and Joe wrote it for me and him as buddies, kind of playing variations on ourselves, in a way.

PopHorror: I love that! You guys have mentioned a few times about how long it took. I had spoken to Joe for Christmas Bloody Christmas when it came out and he had told me about this movie and that he already filmed a very large portion of it when the funding for Christmas Bloody Christmas came in and that he had to stop this one to make that movie. Was it hard getting back into it when you had to get back to shooting this one? What was it like coming back to after so long?

Josh Ethier: It was difficult to come back to it only because, basically being in the pandemic, it was like, this is like an art project with five or six of your best friends. And then when we got the funding to go do Christmas, two and half million dollars and taking over a small town, a robot Santa on an ambulance speeding down Main Street with an axe, that’s not a small art project. That’s a feature film. It was hard to transition back from one to other and what made it doubly difficult was, in Joe’s own words, it was hard to make your biggest film and then go back to making your first or second smallest film. As a result, when he came back, he really just wanted to beef everything up. He was looking at older scenes that we had already shot and he was like, “This could be better, this could be better. I could write it differently. We could touch on this. We could lose this beat; we could lose this thread. Have a little bit more propulsive action here. We could dream up camera moves because it’s my apartment.” That definitely made it go on a little bit longer, but ultimately I think it’s better for the movie. And also, this is a very unique opportunity where you’re making a film in your apartment, so Joe tried to seize on that as much as he could as often as he could. It’s funny. They opened an art installation of Jimmy and Stiggs at The Mystic Museum.

PopHorror: I saw that!

Josh Ethier: They sent a truck over to his apartment to pick up all of his furniture to bring it there. Now his whole apartment is at The Mystic Museum. In like a month or so, that closes, and he finally gets his apartment back. I’m sure he’ll be very excited to like, clean the floors, paint the walls, get some new furniture, do stuff like that. But no, it wasn’t too difficult because I feel like that first year we were making it, it was still so small that it was kind of like we’re doing this when we have time. I was still working on Orphan: First Kill when we started shooting it, so I had full days and then I would go to set afterwards and meet these guys. It wasn’t really in earnest until after Christmas Bloody Christmas. So it wasn’t that it was difficult, it was actually pretty easy to just kick off into something because we had just spent a year making Christmas Blood Christmas – editing and shooting and producing and planning.

Matt Mercer: It was kind of a luxury being able to leave and come back because when they went and did Christmas, I was only on Christmas for a day to do my dying, but I went off and did a film too. The movie I did, I produced a movie called The Dead Thing for Elric Kane. That was more of a lateral move. That movie was about the same budget as this movie, so it wasn’t too weird to shift back in, aside from the tones being incredibly different. I think the strangest thing for me on Jimmy and Stiggs was I don’t normally look like this. I usually am kind of a clean-cut guy.

Josh Ethier: He looks like every actor in LA and that’s why we made him grow his hair out and grow a beard.

Matt Mercer: That was their pitch. Making that adjustment, like Joe said, when he started writing, he was like, “Start growing your beard and your hair out.” I was like, “Oh, cool!” The first stretch of the shoot was nine weeks of us in the apartment and then we went off and did Christmas, and The Dead Thing, and we reconvened and I couldn’t have fathomed we were going to continue to shoot over another three years. Off and on shooting weekends, nights. They’d go in and cut it, come back, figure out what else we wanted to do. I definitely had to turn down some stuff. There was actually a role in The Dead Thing Elric wanted me to do and I was like, “I can’t do it,” because there’s no budget. The guy they got was great and I think it worked out very well, but there’s no budget in Jimmy and Stiggs to wig me and beard me if I had shaved so I just maintained the look and kind of got used to it. I have embraced the look and now it’s going to be difficult to get rid of it because I have a potential other movie coming up where I have to go clean shaven.

PopHorror: You guys keep talking about how this film is a small film, but I just got an email today that Hot Topic is going to have Jimmy and Stiggs merchandise.

Josh Ethier: Yup!

PopHorror: That’s pretty big for a small, indie film.

Josh Ethier: They also sponsored the roadshow. The whole roadshow that Joe was on. That is entirely thanks to The Horror Section. They have done an incredible job of pushing this movie and not only pushing it but accepting the type of movie it is and the type of audience that wants it and pushing it that way. Like they never were like, “Oh, it’ll sell bigger if it’s supernatural in some way so we’re going to make a poster where it looks supernatural.” They didn’t do any of that. They said this movie is neon-splattered, melon-headed aliens, Joe and Matt screaming, hammers, chainsaws, blood, guts, coke, booze, and they put all of that on the poster, they put all of that in the trailer, they put it on all of the Hot Topic merch, which was fun because Hot Topic was like, “We can’t sell shirts that advocate for cocaine use.” But they pushed it really, really hard and they’ve done a really good job on it and it’s really cool to be at the launch of the company and to be part of that initial push to build something bigger, and also to help steer the ship, in a way. That’s really great.

PopHorror: That’s super cool! Neither of you are strangers to the horror genre. What draws you back to horror?

Matt Mercer: For me, it’s just what I grew up watching and loving. I was an introverted kid and the movies we were referencing earlier, whether it’s Evil Dead or Bad Taste, or Frank Henenlotter’s movies – Brain Damage, Basket Case – all that stuff is stuff I grew up watching and it’s all I wanted to make. I went to theater school and trained as an actor but always in my mind was I just want to utilize this towards making genre films. It’s what I’ve always loved and I think that’s where it comes from for me. It’s just what I love. I think I’m the only actor I knew when I finally moved to LA and started auditioning for stuff. I particularly targeted and pushed to get horror movie auditions, no matter the size of the movie because that’s just what I wanted to do. And when I started producing after that, that’s what I targeted as well.

Josh Ethier: I think it’s just from growing up loving horror movies, hanging out with buddies, having sleepovers and watching horror movies, going out on dates and watching horror movies. It’s just something that’s really like a part of all of our DNA and it’s the thing that we still enjoy doing together. We all just went out and saw Weapons last Saturday night. We’re still going to movies; we’re still going to horror films and watching horror films and getting excited when new ones are getting restored and Blu-ray and UHD releases. We’re all huge physical media collectors. Joe even has some film prints. It’s just a part of what we do. Even though there’s other things that I really, really love, I wouldn’t turn down a rom com with a great script. But the blessing of having made several horror films, and by several, I mean several dozen, is that people call you for them and they send you them. Horror films are such a breeding ground for creatives. They always want to do something a little bit different, surprise the audience, especially if they’re horror fans, which most people are, which I think is why it’s had such a lasting impact on the cultural landscape.

Matt Mercer: There’s no other genre that is just so much fun and I can’t think of any movie that I’ve worked on that’s not horror, no one gathers around the monitor to watch an effect happen and should with glee and laugh when it’s awesome to watch, when you see something really cool get pulled off practically. It’s just the most fun.

PopHorror: I have just one last question for you both. What is your favorite scary movie?

Josh Ethier: Well, Matt’s is easy. I can answer for him if you want.

Matt Mercer: Well, tell me, which one is it?

Josh Ethier: Obviously, Halloween!

Matt Mercer: Yeah, okay. It probably is Halloween. I dabble with other ones because I think there are others from that era that are impactful in different ways. Like Texas Chain Saw is a masterpiece to me, but yeah, I think Halloween is the one for me because it’s so relatable. It could be in your neighborhood. I think Michael Myers is just creepy. Atmospherically and the rhythms of it, it’s a perfect film to me.

Josh Ethier: I have a whole sleeve of horror guys on my arm here, but the one that’s up top that I would have to pick as a favorite, because there’s so many that I love, but the one that I think is probably my favorite is Day of the Dead. I think Day of the Dead is the most awesome zombie movie ever made, bar none. Watching human beings break down, I think it’s the best example. I love the gore, I love all the cavemen jokes, I love that they’re growing weed underground, everything about that movie is 10/10 for me.

Thank you so much to Matt and Josh for taking the time to speak with us. Stay tuned for more on Jimmy and Stiggs!