- Hey Riz.
How are you?
- Good. Thanks.
How you doing?
- Yeah, not too bad, thank you.
Not too bad.
Congratulations on the film.
- Thank you.
- It's a wonderful piece of work
and your performance is superb so congratulations on that.
- Thank you.
- I just wondered from...
Obviously there's lots of joys from being an actor.
You get to play amazing characters.
You get to go on these amazing journeys
but tell me about the joy of working with people
that necessarily in your normal day-to-day life
you wouldn't have normally met
because I can imagine that in itself is quite an experience.
- Yeah. It's one of the things I love most
about this job is going and experience new cultures,
new people, making new connections.
And sadly, we live in such a segregated world
between hearing and deaf cultures
so being able to dip my toe in that
and be welcomed into that was great.
It was really down to Jeremy Lee Stone,
who's my sign instructor,
who ends up in the film as my sign instructor
in the deaf community
and who I named my character, Ruben Stone, after Jeremy.
That really welcomed me into the deaf community in New York,
invited me to his wedding, took me to deaf poetry slams
and we were just hanging out and became friends.
It was really enriching.
and I think that the deaf community taught me the meaning
of the word 'listen'.
I think they taught me
that listening isn't something you just do with your ears.
It's something you do with your body.
It's about your attention.
It's about holding space with someone else's energy
and also, I think, Jeremy always said
that hearing people are emotionally repressed
because they hide behind words.
That's a saying in the deaf community.
I didn't know what it meant
until I started becoming more fluent in ASL
and then I realized
actually I'm getting so much more emotional talking
about this stuff in ASL than I would if I was just speaking.
And because when you inhabit and embody
where you're communicating differently,
you connect with it more
and so I feel like it was great to make those friendships
and people but they also taught me what listening is
and what communicating is.
- Yeah. Obviously i imagine Darius [Marder - director, co-writer] pitched you the idea.
What was his kind of pitch to you about the sound
and what he was going to try and accomplish with that?
Because I can imagine it was different for you acting it
as opposed to us watching it as an audience
because we get a very specific way of watching it.
We're kind of in his head in many ways.
We're kind of experiencing as he's experiencing.
How was that kind of idea pitched to you
and what did he give you on set to help you do that?
- Well, it wasn't something that I needed to worry
about too much.
It was part of Darius' vision.
It just meant after seeing Nicolas Becker [composer]
and he would kind of come and place microphones
on my body and ask me to swallow and lick my lips
or breath in or breath out or blink
so that the sound design of the film is constructed mainly
from sounds from our body and my internal processes.
And that's because when you lose your external hearing
what starts to become louder in your audio mix is
vibrational hearing from your body
rather than the sounds coming in through your ears.
It's the resonance of your internal world.
And so in creating that as a soundscape of the film,
it makes you feel like you're in Ruben's head,
you're in his shoes, which is such a bold decision.
And I think he spent six months on the sound mix
and six weeks on the shoot.
So it's a really, really bold decision
and I think that him and Nicolas created something unique.
So in a way he didn't need to pitch me on it.
He just went, "We're going to be...
The sound is going to be really subjective
and it's going to be from Ruben's point of view."
I was like, "Cool.
Let me know.
I'm over here trying to learn the drums, dude.
Stop talking to me.
I've got to play the drums on camera in like a week.
I don't know what I'm doing."
So it was all good.
- Yeah. And you played a lot of it, did you?
A lot of the drums and stuff.
You learned most of it?
- I played all of it.
- Yeah.
So that's what Gary has said.
He said, "Whoever plays this role is going to be...
I don't want to cheat any of the music.
Whenever you're drumming on screen,
you're going to be drumming."
And similarly with the sign language.
It wasn't like learn a couple of signs.
It was like, "You're gonna learn this if you're up for it."
I said, "Yeah. I'd love to."
And so it...
He just wanted everything to kind of be for real, in a way
and I think that gives the whole film
a kind of authenticity that, you know,
hopefully audiences can kind of recognize
and it feels lived in and honest
in a way that I think was quite emotional, hopefully.
- Yeah. Certainly a different challenge
than playing a Symbiote, I can imagine.
It was lovely to talk to you.
Thank you so much and congratulations on the film again.
It's a wonderful piece of work.
Thanks for your time.
- Thanks a lot. Cheers.
- [Narrator] Ladies and gentlemen, you're watching HeyUGuys.
- [Man] Hey you guys, huh.
Is that from The Goonies?
- [Man] It is indeed, yeah.
- [Man] Nice.
- [All] HeyUGuys.