Justin Tipping’s football horror movie Him is built around a lot of unusual decisions, from the striking visual design (which Tipping tells Polygon was drawn from a famous 1990s ad campaign) to a story that blends hallucinatory horror with anger at the treatment of sports stars as commodities. But the most surprising decision was in casting writer-producer-comedian Marlon Wayans as the football superstar both helping and tormenting the protagonist.
Wayans plays Isaiah White, an eight-time championship quarterback and all-time GOAT who’s rumored to be nearing retirement. Cameron Cade (Tyriq Withers) is the young quarterback waiting in the wings to claim Isaiah’s throne. But when Cameron sustains a head injury that may derail his career, Isaiah invites him to a secretive, surreal compound for special training, and takes him straight down a rabbit hole that seems to depart from reality.
If you’re a fan of Wayans’ comedic work in Scary Movie, White Chicks, and In Living Color, you might wonder how he wound up playing against type in Him. The answer goes back 25 years, to the actor’s performance in Darren Aronofsky’s 2000 drug-addiction thriller Requiem for a Dream. Tipping says watching Wayans as Tyrone, the heroin-addict buddy of Jared Leto’s Harry, convinced him the actor could handle a serious role.
“I don’t really think he’s been given the opportunity to showcase this range,” Tipping says. “He locked in, and he transformed physically and mentally for this. I can’t wait for it to come out just so everyone could see what he did, because it blew me away.”
Wayans’ performance during one particular scene — excerpted in the trailer, with Wayans talking about what football means — absolutely shut down the set.
“We got through a take, and I looked around, and everyone’s silent,” Tipping recalls. “A producer came up and was like [reverentially], ‘Oh, we’re making a movie movie!'”
“There’s something really grounding about Marlon, as extreme as he is,” Tipping tells Polygon. “We had to create a whole fantasy world, the same way Any Given Sunday did with Al Pacino and Jamie Foxx. It needed to be very extreme and intense, especially when the story revolves around Marlon shepherding this young, naïve kid.”
To achieve that intensity, Tipping encouraged Wayans to improvise during production — not to add new material, but to separate the emotions from the scripted lines. “This speech about football — how it’s not just a game, it’s everything — on the page, I think people could read that and just think he’s a very straightforward angry coach,” the director says.
“But once we were there on set, I would let him go. We had this thing almost like improv, where he’d keep on book, and then I’d keep rolling, and ‘Keep that emotion! Now just be throwing stuff at [Tyriq] — yell at him about this, yell at him about that.'” And we’d get some wild, just immediate dramatic improv flourishes. And then while he was in that zone, we’d go deliver some of the scripted lines again.”
Tipping says he was looking to activate “something so unhinged” in Wayans’ performance, partially to keep Isaiah unpredictable and unreadable as a character. “From one sentence to the next, we didn’t want to know what he was actually going to feel,” he says. “So it’s unsettling, because you can’t predict from beat to beat what is going to happen. That’s very intentional — he’s gaslighting and just fucking with this kid.”
The director adds that he and Wayans “hit a point where we were communicating without communicating,” where Tipping could just gesture and Wayans would respond in tune with the hand movement. But he says the “football is everything” scene went further than the rest.
“In that scene, he taps into something where it’s no longer about the scene, it’s about something much deeper,” he says. “That’s all subtext happening behind his eyes. I think when people see that scene in its entirety on the big screen… The people on set were both moved and scared. Somehow, people got emotional, but were also like, ‘He’s terrifying.'”
Him premieres in theaters on Sept. 19.
