According to a lot of actors, one of the hardest things to portray convincingly is being absolutely and completely shit-faced. In fact, some actors would argue it’s the hardest thing to do. Which is presumably why before a single second of footage was shot for The World’s End each member of the principal cast had to learn not just how to act drunk, but specific levels of drunk whilst also suplexing a robot alien.
Before that though, acting rat-arsed really is considered to be one of the hardest skills for an actor to master with most every actor falling into the same basic trap when a scene calls for them to appear like they’re on the verge of shitting themself and ordering a kebab, overacting. Something that may make you question how what is widely considered one of the most convincing drunken performances belongs to, of all people, Nic Cage.
This being Nic Cage, he of course did a bunch of weird shit to get into character, in this case hiring an alcoholic to follow him around so he could emulate his behaviour for Leaving Las Vegas.
Anyway, knowing this director Edgar Wright was keen to avoid any of these pitfalls whilst making The World’s End since like 90% of the scenes in the movie called for each of the characters to not just be drunk, but very specific levels of drunk.
Why does this matter you ask? Well there’s a great deal of difference between someone who’s a little buzzed and someone who’s just sunk 8 pints and a row of shots. Likewise, there’s a massive difference in how quickly a pint is going to take effect on a person who’s teetotal and a guy who’s a barely functional alcoholic. Both of which describe characters in the film.
So, to avoid dying on their arse mid-scene, each actor went to drunken masterclass which is a lot less fun than you’re probably imagining and involved spending hours upon hours being directed on the subtleties of being pissed by an expert on physical acting. For anyone thinking, couldn’t they have just gotten drunk instead? Apparently people ask Edgar Wright that a lot and according to him it wasn’t really an option since they’d often need to do multiple takes and a lot of stunts and being drunk would have been a liability nightmare. This said, the cast did drink a lot, but they largely drank a concoction of lemonade and cream soda used as a stand-in for beer.
In regards to learning how to be drunk, each actor had to learn how to be a very specific level of wankered from lightly buzzed and in literal good spirits to absolutely battered and on the verge of throwing up. Footage of each level of being arseholed was then recorded and used as reference for individual scenes. But here’s the thing, according to the cast, the trick to acting drunk is acting sober, since most people who are drunk don’t realise just quite how drunk they are. This means that for a lot of scenes in the movie the actors are sober people pretending to be drunk pretending to be sober.
But this was just the first step since the actors also had to learn how to kick the everloving shit out of a robot, whilst acting whatever level of drunk required for the scene. To accomplish this Wright brought in Brad Allan whose previous work including choreographing Jackie Fucking Chan movies, to teach the cast to how to fight and develop a signature fighting style for each man that would actually evolve as they got progressively more annihilated.
Described by Wright as a combination of “half-remembered wrestling moves and Dutch courage“, each actor was taught to fight as if they didn’t quite know how to actually fight but were just liquored up enough to try something, stupid.
Frost in particular was reportedly a lot of fun to choreograph for with Allan ultimately deciding that, as a formally teetotal rugby player who just downed half a bottle of tequila, he should be an absolute force of nature. Which is why his go-to move is to utilise barstools as make-shift pile-bunkers and tear the alien-robots apart with his bare hands whilst screaming “I fucking hate this town”.
Which makes sense, because yeah, we’ve all been there.
