So, my secret's out. I can finally be honest with you.
I'M IN THE FNAF MOVIE!
OH, IT HAS BEEN A YEAR!
And not only was I in the FNAF movie;
my scene was the first scene shot of the entire production.
Day one, scene one, I was there.
I also got to meet Scott Cawthon after eight years of us dancing around each other
for the first time in person.
But you know what? We're gonna get to all that.
First, and most importantly, I just need to apologize.
I'm sorry that I had to lie to you for the better part of the last year
to make it seem like I wasn't a part of this whole thing.
I'm sorry that there were so many of you that were convinced that I wasn't in it
and were mad at the production on my behalf.
Trust me, I would've been mad at the production too if I had thought the same thing.
I never wanted to cause any sort of stress or anxiety or bad feelings to any one of you out there,
and honestly, for what it's worth, I cannot tell you how wonderful it was for me to see
so many of you up in arms defending my right to be a part of this thing.
I see each of you, and I appreciate what you guys were doing.
Seriously.
It meant the world to see so many of you care and defend me like that.
It was awesome.
I just hope that the surprise of me walking out on stage and being revealed to be in this thing
was worth all the fake-out.
And let me be clear, at the end of the day,
no one from the movie once gave me any sort of instructions on how to handle this whole situation.
No one swore me to secrecy, there was no paperwork,
there were no explicit instructions of what I could and couldn't say.
It was all kind of implied.
Everything else was just kind of on me.
But I also knew that if I didn't cover the movie,
or do, like, live reactions to the trailers on GT Live, things like that,
that you all would probably figure it out.
You would sense that something was off about our content calendar,
that I was hiding something from you,
and in turn, that would just ruin the production's secret.
And let me tell you, I did not expect them to make my life so incredibly difficult,
especially when they started throwing YouTuber cameos into the trailers themselves.
Thanks for that one there, guys.
Is that Dawko?
No, are you kidding me?
Are you kidding me?!
Fun fact, by the way, they actually had me read for that role literally a week before their filming started.
So there I was, awkwardly in my basement at midnight on a Friday,
with Steph filming me reacting to a giant robot bear in the imaginary backseat of my invisible taxi cab.
No!
Not cool, man!
Not cool!
Oh, and also, in case you were wondering,
actually being in the movie kind of made making theories predicting what was going to be in the movie a bit tricky.
I had the whole script, and so basically, unless they rewrote the whole thing,
I knew basically all the major story beats.
It kind of felt like I would be cheating somehow or spoiling the movie in advance unfairly.
So instead, that film theory prediction of the movie was one of the few times
where I actually took a complete step back from the channel
and was almost entirely leaving the script in someone else's hands,
letting film theory's creative director, Lee,
handle all the heavy lifting based on information that was available via the trailers.
And I gotta say, I was surprised with just how much he got right,
and also some of the things that he missed. But you know what?
That's a theory for another day.
Anyway, so yeah, almost exactly one year ago,
all the way back in November of 2022,
I was contacted by Blumhouse to be a part of the movie,
or Bad Cupcake, as they were calling it back then.
It was the secret code name, so no one discovered what it was.
A week before flying out, they were still shuffling me around to see what my part would be,
and on February 1st, day one, scene one, I was in New Orleans to film this thing.
Hey there, welcome to Sparky's.
Okay, but let's get real.
The whole actor thing is kind of crazy.
They're like, no, we will bring the stuff to you, and oh, you can stay in your trailer.
I'm like, it's okay, I can go get my own food.
They're like, no, but you are the actor.
One thing off the bat that I didn't expect was actually the scale of this thing,
because it was massive.
And you're probably thinking, well, no duh, Matt, it was a movie,
but I guess that never really registered with me.
I mean, I've done professional theater before,
I've done things like big MrBeast shoots where he takes over entire football stadiums.
How different could this actually be?
Well, it was different.
It was huge.
I have never seen anything this size before.
The number of people, the coordination.
I had a costume fitting the day before,
and for my dinky little cameo of three lines in this movie,
I kid you not, they had me try on 20 different combinations of outfits,
all of which had to then be run by the director and Scott for their approval.
I mean, an entire floor of a building was just full wall-to-wall of clothing,
hundreds and hundreds of outfits.
Mike alone had practically an entire wall all to himself.
It was actually there that I got to see who else was gonna be a part of this movie up on the wall.
That's where I actually learned that Cory was gonna be a cab driver for the first time.
It was also where I saw that good old Markiplier was supposed to be the security guard
who gets killed at the very beginning of the movie.
But probably most importantly of all,
it's there that I also saw the withered, dabbing Chica posted on the wall,
like some sort of guardian angel over the production.
Basically, I was just doing the whole Theorist thing
by trying to pick up as many small details and Easter eggs as I could
in what few moments I had left unsupervised.
Funny enough, it turns out the production staff were trying to do the exact same thing right back at me.
From the moment I stepped into my first costume fitting,
people started to grill me about FNAF.
No joke.
Apparently, they had been briefed that I was someone who had studied the franchise a lot,
and so I was getting inundated with all sorts of questions about the type of person that Mike is,
or how I saw William Afton in my mind's eye,
or whether I could give them information about characters like Abby.
I honestly think it was them trying to get a feel for whether they were on the right track with all of this,
how the community, as fans, might respond to all of this world that they'd created,
which honestly is pretty cool.
The same thing happened the next day when we were on location at the shoot,
where all the other actors in my scene, between setups,
would take time to ask me about how their characters behaved in the games,
how their role fit into the overarching narrative of the franchise,
which, I gotta say, was kind of a bummer,
because all the characters in my scene were just made up for the movie,
so didn't have a whole lot of detail to impart on them.
So instead of all that, Heather Stewart Masterson,
uh, she's Aunt Jane in the movie,
she just ended up asking me a lot of questions about the parallels between Abby and Baby from the games,
since that's the one that her character is probably most focused on.
In general, though, it was clear that, across the board,
everyone was so eager to do the franchise justice.
They wanted to know as much as they could. They wanted to learn;
they wanted to absorb all that information,
and they were proud to be a part of a project and being able to show it off.
The only sad part of it all was that I was so early in this process,
most of the stuff wasn't even ready for me to see yet.
They really wanted to show me the pizzeria,
but schedule-wise, the first month of production was dedicated to everything happening outside of the pizzeria,
meaning that the set, it was still being built, it was still in process.
So when they took me to see it, it just got a lot of blank walls.
And don't get me wrong, they were impressive blank walls,
very big, very majestic blank walls,
but still left a lot to the imagination.
Same thing kind of happened when they showed me the animatronics.
Everything was still locked away because it needed final testing,
so the most I got was, like, a little peek through a sliver in the wall.
It was awesome.
I think I could make out the murder mask.
I'm like, what's up with that weird Freddy head?
And they're like, I don't know, creative decision.
But come to think of it, it actually kind of worked out really well,
because when it came time to react to the trailers when they were being uploaded to YouTube,
I didn't have to fake anything,
because it was truly my first time getting to see all of this thing finished.
Sure, I knew the storyline of the movie,
uh, I had the whole script in my hands,
and I knew what part I played in this whole thing,
but seeing it all, actually getting to experience how it all worked together,
it was my first time.
No fake reactions here, my friends.
And, to be honest, seeing it on camera doesn't do the scale of this whole thing justice.
I cannot stress to you how massive this production was.
They literally built an entire restaurant inside of an old abandoned Home Depot in New Orleans.
Hallways, rooms, it was a complete restaurant,
which was just mind-blowing to me.
Most movies would probably try to do some clever camera tricks or green-screening or something,
but no, they built an entire building from the ground up inside of another building.
It was crazy.
As far as my role in all of this, I had a one-day shoot,
and that actual day I had to wake up at 4 a.m.,
and then find a car that had been left for me in a random parking garage the night before.
Inside the car were explicit driving instructions to a secret location.
Really felt like something straight out of a spy movie.
From there, I drove an hour out of town to a random diner that had been shut down due to COVID.
Once we were on location, they actually gave me my own trailer.
They told me that's not the sort of thing that a day player would normally get,
but they wanted to give us YouTubers the star treatment,
which, I gotta say, was just, like, incredibly generous of them.
That's right. Got three lines, baby.
This is what I get. It's nice.
This is where I'm gonna be hanging out.
This is where the next two episodes of Game Theory will be written, probably.
Inside my trailer, I found this.
This guy right here. Little rubber chicken head. Little pencil topper.
He was in one of the drawers, and so I'm like,
you know what? I'm gonna work him into my character.
And so, if you see him in the movie, that's it.
Little Easter egg for ya.
And from there, it was on the set where, for the next eight hours,
we were working on a single scene.
Not one diner scene.
You heard that right. Eight straight hours.
One thing. Why so long?
They had the cameras set up outside.
Then they had to move the cameras inside.
Then they had to have the specialty close-up cameras.
Then they had to remove half the booth to capture one side of a conversation.
Then remove the other half of the booth.
Replace the other half of the booth to capture the other side of the conversation.
Then they had to remove the booth entirely,
so they could put cameras right here and capture a close-up of my face.
There were b-rolls of different tables getting served.
There were b-rolls and specialty shots of dishes getting served up at the window.
It was a lot.
For what ultimately amounts in the movie to be, like, three minutes of footage.
As you might imagine, we all started to get a bit creative
with how we were filling our time with each take.
What? What are you doing?
I'm filming this for eventually when I do the, like,
hey, I was in this movie, and it's behind the scenes.
Oh my goodness.
Wah! So no pressure.
Hey!
It's a lengthy time between takes as they moved cameras along
also gave me plenty of chances to explore the set for any hints of lore.
And I actually found a lot of really fun details buried in the walls.
Like, uh, here's one time where I found the fake diner's registration information.
Here's another one where I found a QR code that I was almost convinced
was trying to be a start of some new ARG.
Then I learned that it wasn't.
At which point, I decided to call that detail out to the production team
as being anachronistic, since this was meant to be set at a time
before QR codes became mainstream.
And then they promptly took it down.
So, TLDR of this entire video,
I single-handedly saved the FNAF movie.
By the way, on the subject of small details,
I don't know if you noticed it in the movie,
but the diner I work in is called Sparky's Diner,
which is a reference to one of the earliest urban legends from the first FNAF game
that there was this dog animatronic named Sparky hidden somewhere inside.
The movie is actually full of these sorts of Easter eggs.
For instance, my character's official name, right here.
It's Ness.
I don't know if you'd notice this one in the movie, but it's Ness.
And I was told by everyone that Scott specifically called out
that he needed me to be named Ness.
At first, I immediately thought, like,
oh, this gotta be a reference to Ness from FNAF AR.
Or maybe this is another instance of Vanessa from Security Breach.
You know, just Scott trolling people by using the same name over and over again.
But no, when I met him later in the day,
he told me it was a reference to Sans as Ness.
He was very proud of himself.
Speaking of, the man, the myth, the legend himself, Scott Cawthon.
The whole time, it was unclear whether Scott would actually be there on set.
It was one of those things that people were like,
we don't know if Scott's gonna be there.
He might show up.
We've asked him if he's gonna show up on the first day.
I thought that was a little bit weird.
I mean, it's your first day of shooting your movie
that's been like five plus years in the making.
I don't know, you'd think that you'd try to make an appearance there or something, right?
Well, he did, but apparently it was a big surprise.
He flew in special for that day.
It was interesting.
Most of the production crew didn't know who he was.
They just knew him as the VIP on set,
who everyone had to listen to if he asked them to do something,
but no one actually understood what he was,
that he was the creator of the game.
I think ultimately it winds up being a movie thing, you know,
where he's just responsible for talking to the director
who's then the one who's executing on his creative vision.
So a lot of the rest of the day-to-day staff
don't really need to know that this is the man
that gave them a reason to be there in the first place.
But, yeah, I got to meet him.
It was great.
He has a good strong handshake,
and he looks you in the eye when you talk,
which is always the sign of an upstanding person.
He was wearing a classic Zelda t-shirt,
which, big props to that one,
and he was doing a great job, honestly, of directing everyone.
I overheard him consulting some of the costume department
and clearly outlining his vision of what everyone should be wearing,
which was really cool.
I think most people would probably have been intimidated
by this massive production all leaning on him,
but it was just really impressive to watch.
He made sure that I knew about the whole Ness joke
and also about how he gave the waiter role bonus lines.
In fact, he was so proud of that one line
that he asked me to go over the top with it,
like I do in the videos, as part of the scene,
and I did it for one take, and it was weird,
especially with everyone else in the scene taking the scene so seriously,
and so we all decided to keep it a bit more toned down.
He took off before I left for the day,
and I said,
I'll see you again at the premiere,
and, uh, well, there's no premiere,
so I guess that's the last time I'm ever gonna see him.
Oh, and, uh, no, to answer your obvious question,
we did not talk about lore.
We both swore that one off.
Instead, we talked about the community
and how we both expected the community to take this particular script.
In the end, he was just really grateful for me
being able to be a part of the movie,
and that was mind-blowing to me,
because I'm like, are you kidding?
I was the one who was lucky.
I've got to be in this mainstream movie.
How cool is that?
Growing up, acting was one of my dreams.
To be a performer, that was always, like,
the end goal for me for, like, the first 18 years of my life,
and since then, that goal's obviously changed a lot.
I've moved on.
I've done something, honestly, that I'm more proud of here,
where I'm able to make a business and perform as myself instead of as a character,
but this was, in a lot of ways,
a realization of that dream that baby MatPat had nearly a decade ago.
I actually recorded a bit of my thoughts as I was getting ready to leave the set.
It felt important to document.
That's a wrap.
I was there.
I was in it.
I'm kind of sad,
but it was cool to see a childhood dream, in some ways, get realized.
It was kind of like I got a peek into a multiverse of another life of mine,
and then, that was it.
Back home, like, nothing had ever happened.
I did keep the pencil topper and the name tag as souvenirs, though,
so, yes, I did steal from the set of FNAF the movie.
For two days, this was just a small window into something that was so big.
I got to be a visitor in this massive machine that I hopped off of,
and then, that just continued on without me.
Man, let me tell you,
it is surreal to see posters going up in theaters of a movie that you're in.
Oh, and can I level with you for a second?
This whole thing, it was so intimidating.
You know how I keep doing videos this year about being in the PGA Tour
or producing a Broadway show,
and how the theme of the year happens to be, like,
say "yes and" to your life?
Well, this was actually the first of those things,
because it was at the top of the year.
This was the thing that got me started on the whole theme,
because it is one thing to speak as yourself on a couch about things that you know,
and it is something entirely different to walk in as a complete noob
and say scripted lines as a random character named after a meme
to a crew of seasoned actors while they're stopping public traffic outside
and 50 production staff are slowly zooming a camera into your face.
I mean, I've done a lot of performances, but this?
This was just at another level.
The only thing that I asked the director, Emma, to make sure of
was that I didn't deliver some sort of, like, cringey YouTuber performance.
You know what I mean.
It can't not be cringey when you're saying your, like, own catchphrase, that's kind of silly.
But, you know, I just didn't want to bring the movie down.
And to be honest, I think I did all right.
Anyway, that right there, my friends, that is my story,
and it feels so good, so good to finally come clean about it.
I've wanted to bring you in as a part of this journey for the longest time.
In the end, I just, I cannot thank the team there enough
for all their incredible generosity and their patience.
And, Scott, thank you for giving me the chance to be a part of this.
But most importantly, thank you.
This whole thing, this is our collective victory, right?
Because without you supporting me, or supporting these channels,
and supporting these wacky theories, none of this would have been possible.
And if you haven't seen the movie, then what the heck are you waiting for?
Watch it, and then go watch it again.
Show them the force of Team Internet
so that the late-night hosts and the executive producers
finally learn that things from the Internet deserve to be pronounced correctly.
Anyway, in the end, who knows?
Maybe there'll be room in the sequel for the return of a well-meaning cringey waiter
with a love of breakfast and a meme-ish name.
But until then, remember, that's not a theory.
It's just a video. A video for you.
Thanks for watching.