Dan Stevens Shot 'Kill Switch' In Four Days

Dan Stevens is having a phenomenal year. He starred in the wildly creative and imaginative FX series, Legion, which got picked up for a second season. He also co-starred in one of the best films of the year so far, Colossal, and was loved by millions in Beauty & the Beast, a movie that made over a billion dollars. He also starred in another film, Kill Switch, which came out earlier this year. He only worked on it for four days, despite being the star.

Below, learn how he did it.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, director Tim Smit landed the busy actor due to the limited time the project required. Since most of the movie is shot from a first-person perspective, the actor only was only needed for a few days on set and a couple of hours for voiceover.

Stevens plays Will Porter, who has to save the world after the mystery company he works for screws up an experiment to create unlimited energy. Porter gets sent to a parallel world, where he'll have to look for the "Kill Switch." The Kill Switch is the one item that could save the day. The sci-fi thriller is based on a short Smit made.

Here's the trailer for Kill Switch, which came out in January:

Two years after Stevens worked on Kill Switch, he did the rest of his work over the phone. As Smit explained to THR, stand-ins were hired for the other 14 days of shooting:

All the POV stuff, we didn't have the budget to allow him to be on set all the time. So what we did was we shot it with a stand-in. For him, it was a commitment of four days. We kept in touch, and then suddenly two years later, 'oh shit! I've got to do the movie again.' He did an amazing job, I should say ... He pretty much did it real time.

The director, who handled all the special effects himself from his home, discussed the difficulty of shooting the POV sequences:

It's truly demanding [for the camera operator] to wear such a system throughout a shoot, even though Kill Switch was only shot in 18 days. It was very demanding on his head and neck. It was nice for him to spend four days on set and come back a couple of years later, but for the performance, during the POV scenes, it was acting against a lens, there's no reaction against something like that. It was very difficult for the actors in the POV scenes to act.

POV sequences are generally hit or miss. With critics, the approach missed the mark when the movie hit theaters and VOD. Reviews were mostly negative. Smit says with his next feature he wants to improve the character work. He was certainly ambitious and lucky with this project, though, being able to produce it under such restraints and with only a handful of days with its star.