franchise must represent a particularly hairy leap into the unknown for everyone involved.Maze Runner
“Everywhere they go, there’s this freakin’ camera, so in my close-ups half their face is covered by a f---ing camera,” says Ball. “That’s the necessary process of it all.” We’re talking in the final weeks of Ball’s near five-year journey to making the film, a period that saw original studio Fox bought by Disney, the disruptions of COVID, and the decision to shoot the film in Australia . He’s still in the thick of that final edit, but he’s confident what he’s made effectively links the first iteration of the saga with the Matt Reeves trilogy that began within 2011, and hopefully lays the groundwork for yet more films to come.
“It reminded me why I became an actor, which is to be something else entirely,” he says. “They talk about your body being your tool, which is kind of pretentious, but it’s true. This kind of performance really makes it clear just how much of a full body thing being somebody else is.” “He starts out very naive – he doesn’t know anything about the outside world, he’s got a lot of pressure from his father, and he doesn’t think he can live up to what his father expects from him. When I pictured Noa, I pictured a chimpanzee, but I also pictured myself. There was a merging.”