Dylan O’Brien Doesn’t Care If You Like Him

Deep into the shoot on the hot, humid beaches of Thailand for Send Help, Dylan O’Brien was having the time of his life. He’d connected and bonded with his costar, Rachel McAdams, and felt more creatively aligned with his director, Sam Raimi, than he’d expect for a studio production. Then Raimi told him that, for this gory survival thriller, he’d need to eat a beetle in a visceral single-take sequence on camera.

“He was like, ‘There’s however many species that you can actually ingest, and it’s totally fine, they’ve been tested and proven,’” O’Brien recalls through chuckles. “I’m kind of like, ‘Oh, whoa. I wasn’t spoken to about that…But I’m game. I trust it. Yeah, that makes sense.’”

Then Raimi broke the act: He was kidding. The bug would be fake. But this much is clear: O’Brien would have eaten the beetle. Watching the nasty Send Help oner in question, you can feel the actor’s insides already twisting themselves out, gearing up for the crunch of raw insect.

We’re sitting on a poolside patio in Hollywood, almost exactly a year since I first met O’Brien in advance of the Sundance premiere of Twinless, the dark indie comedy for which he’s nominated for best lead performance at next month’s Spirit Awards (the film, directed by James Sweeney, is also up for best feature). In the time since, he admits, he’s experienced a kind of industry whiplash — great reviews followed by promotional indifference for Twinless, and an exciting return to the world of studio movies with 20th Century’s Send Help, having consciously avoided blockbusters after his breakout in the Maze Runner films. 

Raimi came knocking with his own return to the space, as Send Help is his first original film in 17 years, coming off of the most recent Doctor Strange entrant. O’Brien grew up a massive Raimi fan. “I was so much the kid who really loved Spider-Man. I’m pretty sure I went for my 10th birthday party, and I still think those far and away the best Spider-Man [movies],” he says of Raimi’s original 2002-2007 trilogy. “Most of the population of the world would fight you on that at this point. I don’t know. I feel kind of fearful of saying it because it’s such a crazy thing now when you exert opinions.”

He throws his hands up, in endearing exasperation at the disastrous state of online discourse, before forging ahead: He also loved Raimi’s last original, Drag Me to Hell, as well as his horror classics Darkman and The Evil Dead. 

Send Help had already attached its female lead in Rachel McAdams, whom O’Brien has long admired, and the script by Freddy vs. Jason alums Mark Swift and Damian Shannon felt bold. “It’s certainly not lost on me that it was definitely the best job that’s come my way in a really long time,” the 34-year-old says. His first meeting with Raimi only solidified that feeling. “He had a paper bag on his head — he welcomed me into his office with this paper bag on his head and he was like, ‘Hey, pal. How are you? I’m Sam,’” O’Brien says. “That was such a warming way to greet me. And it was so disarming and it was so welcoming.”

This thing had the whole package, in other words. And yet O’Brien felt nervous — specifically, about his character. He wanted to make him meaner. “I was very concerned about: Are we going to be in a space now all of a sudden where we’re making the safest version of this?” he says. “Especially from a studio space when they’re doing something original, which is rarer and rarer nowadays, there’s this fear and calculating of the numbers and wanting the most bankable down the middle thing — and that’s what it breeds creatively.” 

The likability quotient was “the one turn that we initially conflicted on,” Raimi tells me. “But by that point he had earned my trust and we ended up going with his direction — he was so right! In retrospect, I couldn’t imagine the character being played any other way.” McAdams adds of O’Brien, “He said to me, ‘It seems like people are so worried about looking good or coming off as likable nowadays. I think that’s so limiting’…. There was certainly a nervousness in the room some days where it was like, ‘How much will the audience take?’”

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In Send Help, O’Brien plays Bradley Preston, who’s just inherited his late dad’s company as CEO. He’s immediately irritated by one of his employees, Planning & Strategy Department veteran Linda Liddle (McAdams), who says she was promised a promotion before the change in leadership. Bradley hears none of it: He’s repulsed by her and plans on firing her, but only after he gets some use out of her genius for numbers on a business trip to Thailand. In a violent storm, however, their plane goes down — and Linda and Bradley are the only survivors on the beach. It just so happens that Linda is a Survivor fanatic who’d been training for this day for years without realizing it. Bradley, both injured and clueless, has no choice but to let her lead the way. Wish him luck.

Raimi was unfamiliar with O’Brien’s work on film until casting director Nancy Nayor introduced him to his work. Though he broke out leading YA hits like Teen Wolf and Maze Runner films, O’Brien has more recently proven himself as a versatile character actor, whether as an intersex sex worker’s pimp and lover in Ponyboi or as a boisterous Dan Ackroyd in Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night. “I fell in love with him,” Raimi says. “He’s brilliant in [Send Help] and he truly made it his own. He has a funny look to him, but he’s talented.” 

The project arrived at the right time for O’Brien, who was just launching Twinless at Sundance when production began. Like many actors of his generation, he’d fallen out of love with the big movies that had enticed him to the industry in the first place. “I come from that window of time when I was a kid, where I’m weirdly jaded about the advancements of CGI and how they’ve produced a negative effect,” he says. “I’m one of those guys who looks back at movies from the ’90s and I’m just like, we had it better then.”

Fortunately, Send Help gloriously showcases Raimi’s love for twisted comedy, unhinged action and copious amounts of blood. It also presents two fiercely flawed protagonists.

“That’s going further and further away, and yet every year, what are the movies that we’re still loving? Look at Leo in One Battle [After Another],” O’Brien says. “It’s proven that this is a dynamic leading character. Why are we so afraid to just lean into that?” He continues, “You don’t see original swings like this in a studio space. I’ve got to be honest, I don’t think that it would’ve even been greenlit if it wasn’t Sam and it wasn’t Rachel. I was just really grateful to be a part of something that I guess I personally miss.”

McAdams tells me that Send Help is “one of the most experimental films I’ve ever done.” O’Brien was a big reason why: In rehearsals and on set, the two actors and Raimi would have long talks about the story, the characters, their descent into sun-kissed madness. “Dylan had such a vision for the arc of his character and he was so brave,” she says. “He said, ‘I really believe in this. I really believe that the stronger the choices, the better the payoff.’ And he was absolutely right.’” These choices are certainly strong at the outset: He plays Bradley as the most arrogant guy in the room, blinkered by privilege and baffled by the notion of giving Linda the time of day. He’s fun to hate — but he’s familiar. You know this kind of guy.  

“I could be hateable, I still could be wrong. I could be totally hateable in this,” O’Brien says. “But I hope that it was grounded enough in a way that we really tried to make it make sense from his point of view.”

He felt as though McAdams and Raimi had his back the whole time — necessary, since by the time they entered their second month shooting long days on that hot Thailand beach, things started getting “a little delirious,” McAdams admits. She and O’Brien had long talks about the industry and navigating careers in today’s topsy-turvy Hollywood. “It was really beautiful to see someone that I looked up to so much from a creative standpoint, and then got to meet and work with on a personal level and looked up to even more as a human,” O’Brien says. 

And when it came to their physical fighting scenes, of which there are many? The trust remained. “I had to roll on her at one point, and she’s like, ‘I think you’re denser than you realize,’” O’Brien recalls. “I’m like, ‘What do you mean? Look at these tiny knees!’”

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O’Brien is winding down one of the most intensive press tours of his life for Twinless, and he describes it as a rollercoaster. At a few points, he brings up Instagram. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been complained to about not having an Instagram — and that’s coming from people who truly have the power to build awareness. It’s like it’s a slap in the face. It’s literally telling me that they’re not going to spend the money,” he says. “But it’s hard to not have your moments of feeling responsible, even ridiculous moments where you’re like, ‘Should I have gotten an Instagram?’ It’s unfair to yourself. There are, I’m sure, casting conversations I’m left out of because of that. It’s not like that’s actually explicitly said to me during these conversations, but I imagine so just because it seems to be very much a main topic.”

Twinless was made for next-to-nothing and features O’Brien’s richest screen performance to date as twins — one grieving the death of the other. It premiered at last year’s Sundance to some of its best reviews. It was available on the festival’s online platform, which led to explicit scenes featuring O’Brien being leaked on social media; it was then taken down. The movie struggled to find distribution, despite the great reviews and the marquee role for O’Brien, who’s got a following — Instagram handle or not. 

“My glass half-full take would be, ‘This is horrible, but any awareness is awareness,’” O’Brien says of whether the leaks were a factor. “But I do think that there is a bit of that that may have diminished our film.”

In any case, Twinless was eventually acquired by Roadside Attractions, an experience O’Brien seems to have found frustrating. “It’s hard to not look back and be like, ‘Wow, what would it have been like if it was really put out there?’” he says. “Such a massive piece of it is on the studios and distributors of really backing the films that they acquire, especially when they’re smaller films and not something that someone’s going to know outright.” He looks at me, assessing whether I can read between the lines. “You know what I’m saying?” I nod: from the great reviews a year ago to the Spirit noms of today, Twinless had the goods. 

“There’s many moments where it certainly, yeah, was super disappointing,” he says. “It was all there. That’s the piece where it’s the disappointment.”

Twinless is up for the top Spirit Award opposite the Oscar nominee Train Dreams, and then movies that fell largely outside any kind of awards conversation: Peter Hujar’s Day, The Plague and Sorry Baby. “At the time that the nominations came out, half of these, I was like, ‘I have to look it up’ — and they’re fantastic,” O’Brien says. “You look at this year: I don’t know if I could name a single independent film that was really marketed, and that’s scary.”

Which brings us back to Send Help: the kind of filmmaker-driven, midbudget studio movie that Hollywood seems to have largely cast aside. It’s not necessarily on a blood-soaked survival thriller being released at the end of January to single-handedly resurrect the category, but O’Brien has noticed the power of its marketing. “I can’t watch a single playoff game without seeing the damn trailer 19 times,” he says, smiling. “I’m so psyched to see how much they’re getting behind it.”

Yet O’Brien also speaks with enough wisdom to know things, on a macro level, may keep going in the opposite direction. As he continues to map out his career, he’s clearly got that “vision” McAdams was talking about — multifaceted, thoughtful, eager for risk. “This was a unicorn of a job,” he says. “I certainly don’t think Send Help means that I’m going back toward the studio space.” I nod along, and he continues: “Listen, I would if they were all Send Helps, right? But it just feels like it’s, again, a novel —” he struggles to find the right words. He’s led us to this point expertly, however, so it’s not too hard to send a little help to land this plane. 

“Exception that proves the rule?” I ask. “Yeah, do that,” he says, grinning. “Say I said that.”

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Send Help hits theaters Friday. Twinless is currently streaming on Hulu.