Can someone under the influence of hypnosis be made to commit horrible murders? This question is tackled by the new film, Murderous Trance, based on the real life Denmark hypnosis murders from the 1950s. Directed by Arto Halonen, Murderous Trance first debuted in its home country back in 2018, and now, following Coronavirus-related delays, is finally making its way to American shores.

Set in the aftermath of WWII, for which the nation of Denmark was struggling to regain their identity after their controversial neutrality in the war and accommodating attitude towards the German occupation, Murderous Trance feels like a snapshot of a time and place not often captured in cinema, and that's before factoring in the unbelievable murders that nonetheless occurred in real life. The film stars Pilou Asbæk (Game of Thrones) and Rade Šerbedžija (In the Land of Blood and Honey), but the real scene-stealer here is Josh Lucas, who appears as the real life war criminal/Eastern philosophy enthusiast, Bjørn Schouw Nielsen.

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While promoting the American release of Murderous Trance, Josh Lucas spoke to Screen Rant about his work on the film, from the benefits of jet-lag on his performance to the challenges of channeling the right attitude to fittingly portray a "Nazi Yogi," as he calls the character. He also shares some stories from the frontlines of Hollywood, including his lament over the current anonymity of his film, The Mend, as well as that one time he basically ripped off part of his hand on the dangerous set of Wolfgang Peterson's epic disaster movie, Poseidon.

Murderous Trance is out now on Digital and VOD.

Josh Lucas Murderous Trance Guardian Angel

I want to jump into the movie, but before that, obviously, I'm sure you've been, for the past year, answering questions about the pandemic and everything, but I feel it's been especially hard on theater actors. You've been a theater actor for a really long time. It's kind of like a 9-to-5, but I imagine you like your job a lot more than other people.

Josh Lucas: (Laughs)

Have you been chomping at the bit to get back on stage, or have you appreciated the time to, I dunno, reflect and count grains of sand on the beach?

Josh Lucas: It's Zak, right? Zak, you know, it's a good question. I just was on with Backstage, and Backstage is obviously how I found my first auditions in my career and all that. I was talking with them and we were doing a live chat with a bunch of actors. It's been a complete and total shutdown for me since 2019, is the honest truth. So, more than a year now. Any of us who do theater, and even the movie business, as far as I can see, is still pretty much totally shut down. So it's very easy to be terrified and really in a dark place about it. I'm not, because I really work hard to figure out ways to trick my brain to be grateful, and to try and understand what I have, from a creative standpoint, to work on. It might be in the future, but I can't overstate how uncomfortable it is for most people who have zero income. It's easy to get bleak, that's for sure. That said, how do we fight through it? We were talking about that just now, on this call with a bunch of actors. Part of it is, time can be a great blessing, to say we'll go read books, watch movies, do whatever we can do to feed ourselves, look for projects, write something if you have never written something. Just connect, connect, connect, as much as you can. Part of it, I think, is the idea that we feel really lonely within it, right? We're the only only ones experiencing this, even though we know everybody is. That's kind of the weird thing about being a human being. I can't overstate how sure I am that everyone is in the same place. Man, I guess it's just about empathy, right? It's really about being kind to ourselves, not drinking too much. (Laughs)

For me, having this job has been such a blessing because I've been able to talk to people. If I didn't have it, I pretty much wouldn't talk to anybody!

Josh Lucas: Yeah, exactly. It's weird... It's not that I don't like press junkets, but they can be pretty exhausting and tiring. I've had the exact same experience, "Yeah, I get to talk to some people today!"

Josh Lucas Murderous Trance interrogation

Hopefully I'll be able to ask you something that you haven't already been asked 50 times today, but we'll see how that goes. Okay, let's talk about this movie. You, oh, you upset me greatly, in that you are scary to watch and make me uncomfortable in a Hannibal Lecter kind of way. Just, like, oh, take it down, next scene, please, it's too intense! In a very good way, I promise.

Josh Lucas: He's a terrifying dude, you know? First of all, a real person who has that level of intelligence, manipulation... The joy of being an actor oftentimes is, like, okay, you get to gnaw on the scenery when you play a bad guy, right? But it's rare that you're playing a bad guy who is a real person, who did these things, and to try and understand why he did them, and to try and get in his skin, if you will... I had a very strange experience making this movie. I shot the entire movie, my part of it, in eight days. I arrived in Zagreb, Croatia. I was super jet-lagged for some reason, more than I had ever been, and I don't know why. I got off the plane, I went straight to work. Literally, I went from the airport to do the first scene. I went home, to the hotel, and I didn't sleep. I woke up the next day, went to set, and I was a mess. I looked terrible, I felt terrible. And suddenly, about halfway through the second or third day of not sleeping and playing this character, I realized, it was really working for me! (Laughs) I looked horrible, I felt horrible... You know how when you're exhausted and jet-lagged and all that, and you just have a bad temper? It was really weirdly improving my performance, my understanding of the character, and my... My eyes looked nuts. (Laughs) It was just all helping, weirdly! So I was just, like, okay, it's only eight days, you can handle this! I don't know, it was weirdly fun to be in the worst mood ever. Normally, you try to get out of it, but for me, I was getting more into it.

It kind of works for the character, because he's this charming, charismatic guy on the outside, but I imagine that being... There are very few characters who can get away with just being evil, but I'll be damned, a Nazi is always one of them. Carrying that takes a toll.

Josh Lucas: He loved it. I don't think many people who are evil... Well, look, I don't think there are many evil people, but in certain cases, the ones that are, they are trying to hide it. But Bjørn Schouw Nielsen, this character, he really reveled in it. He reveled in messing with people's minds. He loved the joy of manipulation. I think he was a true sociopath that way. And a really utterly fascinating character that way. Look, he did yoga in prison in the 1940s. That's pretty rare for a Westerner. It was much more Eastern. He was studying Eastern philosophy, studying psychology, studying all these things. It's weird but it's true, he helped bring popcorn to Denmark! (Laughs) You know? Like, he was just a bizarre dude. And I just... The more I felt terrible, the more fun I had playing him. And the more I got into, as you said, the Hannibal Lecter, but in this case, the real version of it.

You did your whole part in eight days. Which shifts one of my questions. You look great. And you are shirtless in part of your scenes... And hairless (bald), but that's a whole other thing. Are you a workout guy in general, or did you know this was coming up so you had to set aside time to buckle down?

Josh Lucas: Yeah, I actually don't know that I agree I look great, I think I look pretty terrible in the movie!

Josh Lucas Yoga Murderous Trance

(Laughs)

Josh Lucas: But I have done a lot of yoga in my life. Yoga has been a great tool for me. A great savior for me. And I was intrigued by the idea that this guy taught yoga in the prison while he was there for Nazi crimes. What a weird... A "Nazi Yogi." But I was able to talk to the director, about, "Hey man, can we use some of this? Can we... I had this weird thing I learned how to do years ago, called the Scorpion. It's a strange yoga posture where you're on your forearms, your entire body is arched and backwards. It's like a handstand, but it literally looks like a scorpion about to attack. I was like, if we could play with that in the movie, that would be super interesting. So all of those things were to feed the character and feed the story, and they're all based in truth. They're all based in what this guy really was doing, and how he was able to mess with this kid's mind so badly and have him end up doing these heinous crimes.

It definitely works, because you were magnetic in this movie. I was excited to watch it, and I was not disappointed.

Josh Lucas: Thanks Zak. I want to say thank you, because, look, this is a tiny little movie that we worked really hard on. It's been kind of stuck in this weird netherworld of "Is it streaming? Is it theatrical? What are we going to do with it? Is it an American movie? Is it an international movie? Why is it in English?" There's all these weird questions about it. So it's getting out there, and I think it deserves to get out there. I'm gonna maybe get in trouble for saying this, but I saw The Little Things the other day, the Denzel Washington movie, and I thought it was one of the worst major movies I've ever seen in my life. And that movie got so much attention, and there's so much power and money behind it. And this movie had nothing behind it, and we made it for no money. I'm grateful that it's going to maybe get out there a little bit, and I'm thankful to you for talking about it a little bit. I think it's worth seeing, that's for sure.

Josh Lucas in Murderous Trance

Honestly, that's my favorite part of this job. Is getting to talk to big famous people who are doing stuff that is not necessarily part of the studio system where they're constantly shoving the next big thing down your throat. Related to that, I want to ask you, you're a big star, you've got fans all over the place. Is there a piece of work you've done that you feel didn't get the attention it deserved in its time that you'd like to shout out for the Screen Rant reader?

Josh Lucas: There's one in particular, called The Mend. It was a tiny little movie, we made it for $100,000. The entire budget, everything. We shot it in ten days at people's apartments. The director/writer's apartment. It's a movie that did get nominated for an Independent Spirit Award and a few things, but because it never had distribution, no one's ever heard of it. It's a wild, amazing, funny, weird, wonderful story. It's a really good film. Everyone I know who's seen it is like, "That's a great film!" But again, like you said, it was made for $100,000. Nobody in the world got behind it. There was no studio, no media, no nothing. That one in particular, I really loved. If people want a weird, interesting movie, that's a good one.

Kind of one the opposite side of that spectrum, this was one of my favorite movies when I was a teenager. I've seen it... I don't even want to guess how many times I've seen Poseidon. I was a huge Irwin Allen fan, as a kid, those movies scared me. The Towering Inferno, still, to this day, is one of the scariest movies. I can't deal with it. And Poseidon was a favorite. But I heard that you broke your back on that movie.

Josh Lucas: I didn't break my back. What I broke was, and it sounds like a lot less, but I broke my thumb. And what I mean by, "I broke my thumb," I literally tore... The guy who did surgery on my thumb said it was the worst injury on a thumb he'd ever seen. I basically tore my thumb off my hand. The only thing that was connected, still, was the skin. I ripped the muscles off, I ripped the bone off, I ripped everything off. The way it happened was, I was on a wall during one of the later sequences, and I was trying to climb up a wall upside down in the boat and all that... What's called a "water cannon," which were these huge, almost like sprinklers, they were shooting massive chunks of water as it looked like the boat was falling apart. And one of them hit me. I was about 20 or 30 feet up in the air on this wall, and it hit me, and my harness, for some reason, didn't hold. I fell backwards, and I fell onto my thumb. And I literally just tore it off. I've got these perfect surgical scars on both sides because they had to go in and reconstruct it. Let's put it this way: for my thumb, I was asleep for 12 hours in surgery, because that's how weird and hard the surgery was, the guy told me. That was a wild movie to make, man. We all went through... There was something on that movie they called "The Poseidon Crud," because they flooded the Warner Bros. stages, and those were, like, 100-year-old stages. So everyone was getting sick with this weird flu nobody could understand, so they called it The Poseidon Crud.

Josh Lucas in Poseidon

I mean, from my point of view, it was worth it, I don't know if it was worth it for you... (Laughs) That sounds traumatizing!

Josh Lucas: Nah, it was great! C'mon, I was grateful to do it.

That's good to hear! Thank you so much, I've been such a big fan of yours for a really long time, and I can't wait to catch you on the next one!

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