Hey, Jack, how you doing? Yeah.
Good, thanks. How are you? I'm good, thank you.
I can't feel like you're being.... you look like you're being upstaged
with that background.
Very nicely done with a massive dog.
I didn't do great in any of the promotional artwork for this film.
To be honest, it's very hard when you've got a ten foot red dog in it.
Very,
very loud, very hard,
Congrats on the movie. It's great fun.
Oh, thanks very much. It's great fun.
I felt like if while I'm not the target audience being a nearly 40 year old man,
although maybe some would say these films are good for for the soul, for anybody.
Was it the same for you?
So if I was a six year old,
this would be the greatest thing I've ever seen - a giant red dog.
Can you imagine if you were a six, seven, eight years old
going to say this for the first time that you'd be enthralled all the way through?
Yeah, I mean, completely.
Like, that's when when I read the script, I was like, This is the kind of movie
that when I was a kid, I would have absolutely adored,
and it had that sort of feel of like those kind of classic
sort of nineties family movies.
For me, that's what it evoked.
But yeah, I've actually had the opportunity now
to see it in a cinema with kids for the first time, which is amazing.
Like, I had a screening yesterday for friends and family
and they brought all their children and my godchildren
and nieces and nephews and stuff.
We've obviously never been able to see anything I've done - it's always been far too inappropriate.
It's amazing to watch it through a kid's eyes and to see them,
you know, getting excited and getting sad and then sort of cheering at the end.
And yeah, that's a really special moment.
Yeah, I think it's kind of kids movies if the kids are not distracted.
And so you've done yourself a good job jumping around to doing all the things.
They're not interested, I guess.
Well, they might not be good.
Well, I'd like to hear is I saw some of the behind the scenes stuff,
including two guys in this big plastic suit pretending to pee on a tree.
That was your reality for a while.
That must have been a strange experience, given that's the way it's made.
It's not really what the kids will will see,
but I just watched all the behind the scenes things and so on that
that was that's a wild ride in itself.
Yeah, I know it was quite strange, like the process of filming it.
And yeah, we had these two guys, the puppeteers who operated this massive
like essentially red skeleton of Clifford, which was quite scary.
But then there was also lots of Clifford body parts
because there were scenes where you need to do something
where you're interacting with Clifford's paw or his tail.
So they had his tail, which was operated by two guys
from the kind of grips department sort of wagging it back and forth.
We had Clifford's head on a pike, which was terrifying.
The scene where I'm seeing like ten foot Clifford for the first time was a guy
holding Clifford's sort of dismembered head on a stick.
So no acting was required for me screaming in terror when I saw that
Clifford's tongue, which was operated by a guy from the props department
that put his hand into a big rubber tongue and then dipped it in a bucket
of slobber.
I'm just thankful we didn't have Clifford's lipstick on set.
Well, yeah, I mean, that would have been that would have been quite hilarious.
Doesn't feature in the film?
I mean, I know it doesn't feature in the film because people send me screenshots.
Genuinely, they send me screenshots.
I've had several screenshots where the dog's genitals.
I mean, who is doing that?
Who is screenshot in the Big Red Dog getting annoyed?
That's their moment where the suspension of disbelief has pierced.
The dog doesn't have genitals.
Also, I feel like in terms of your acting career,
you've got your green screen card now because you've done this
with the green screen and the red, the red dog.
And then you was the Jungle Cruise, which is a big green screen adventure.
Do you enjoy that side of it?
Because it's kind of
make believe in some respect it gives you a different energy
than just interacting with people, I guess.
Yeah.
Dwayne Johnson wasn't there for any of the shooting of Josh.
They just he's moderated by someone holding a massive tennis ball on the set
as actually a slab of meat.
They just stick a steak onto on to a stick and then they add him in in
post. That's how he's able to do so many films.
He's in every single film, isn't that it, right?
Yeah, every single film...
Yeah, I know.
I definitely feel like I've done quite a lot of CGI work over
the last couple of years,
and it is a bit of a leap of faith because you just have no idea
what it's going to look like, you know, the finished product. And
yeah, I think it would be quite nice for whatever
I do next to be something where it's just working with actors in a room.
That would be nice, although clearly, if Clifford's done quite well,
Jungle Cruise did quite well.
They might be your sequels, so you might have to go back.
But yeah, yeah, yeah, no.
I think, yeah, I would probably
I say I would probably be willing - I'd be biting the hand off
to do a sequel of both of those films
because I had an absolute whale of a time filming.
We just want to see that tongue again.
Yeah, I really want to see that tongue again!
Jack, lovely to talk with you.
Good luck with the film. Really good to speak to you.
Thanks so much.