Featured Image Credit: Universal Pictures
Topics: Film and TV
Jess Hardiman
The actor who played the titular bear in Elizabeth Banks’ new flick Cocaine Bear has opened up about his unusual gig, explaining the extreme craft behind the role.
The comedy-horror is inspired by the stranger-than-fiction true story of a 500lb black bear that ingested a whole load of cocaine from a duffel bag that was dropped from a plane during a drug run from Colombia.
A synopsis says: "An oddball group of cops, criminals, tourists, and teens converge in a Georgia forest where a 500-pound black bear goes on a murderous rampage after unintentionally ingesting cocaine."
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Of course, the film’s leading star is the eponymous Cocaine Bear – or Cokey, as it was nicknamed on set.
Rather than using a real bear, director Elizabeth Banks decided to create the creature using a mix of CGI and motion capture, with motion capture performer Allan Henry tasked with creating the bear's movement.
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Speaking to Variety, Henry explained how he looked to some of cinema’s most memorable bears for inspo, including the animal from The Revenant that famously beat up Leonardo DiCaprio’s character and Baloo from The Jungle Book.
“A lot of it was nature documentaries and CCTV footage and camera footage of people who were like, ‘There’s a bear in my backyard tearing up my car,’” Henry added.
The actor and stuntman continued to explain what it was like playing the cocaine-fuelled female bear – a job that was no doubt one of his stranger roles.
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“There’s a ring that supports your forearm and then rods that come down the sides and there’s a hand grip so I can hold onto it,” Henry said of his costume – photos of which was shared on Instagram by his co-star Alden Ehrenreich.
“And then that extends even further to essentially a foot or a prosthetic, like a rubber ball or something. It means that the length of my arm is now half a meter longer.
“And then I have a helmet, very similar to the camera rigs we would use normally in performance capture to capture facial performance. And it has aluminum bars coming out, which have a silicone bear snout and mouth with little ping pong balls for eyes so that I can manipulate it and move it from my neck.”
He added: “When Cokey interacts with the environment or with other actors, I can nuzzle them and move against them without causing any damage because the silicone is soft and moves the same way that skin would move."
Watch Cocaine Bear in cinemas now.