The apocalypse is no laughing matter. Unless, of course, Adam McKay has something to do with it.
Chances are, if you’re one of Netflix’s whopping 222 million subscribers, you’ve seen or at least heard about Don’t Look Up, one of the most anticipated movies of 2021, due to the allure of massive stardom and an enticing premise. With renowned actors Meryl Streep, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Jonah Hill, Rob Morgan, Timothée Chalamet, and Cate Blanchett; Adam McKay (Stepbrothers, Vice, The Big Short) directing; guest appearances from superstar musicians Kid Cudi and Ariana Grande; and the imminent destruction of Earth hanging over the characters’ heads, you’d have to be a force of nature to resist the temptation of watching this movie.
If you’re anything like my family and me (embarrassingly avid Streep fans), you watched the movie first thing after opening presents on Christmas Day when the movie was first released. The title tells us not to look up but I couldn’t look away when I saw a familiar face on screen, almost twenty minutes in.
“Hey! I think I know that kid!”
Yep. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting Rob Radochia ‘23 on campus, you probably recognized him playing Evan Mindy, Leonardo DiCaprio’s on-screen son.
Driven by a fierce love of comedy and Jennifer Lawrence, I contacted Radochia about an interview, and he kindly agreed to sit down with myself and fellow TCV editor, Jimmy Cork ‘22 on Feb. 6th.
So how does a Massachusetts-born hockey player at Connecticut College end up starring alongside some of the movie industry’s biggest names? We asked him.
“It was very freaky. I was taking the spring semester remotely. The reason I left school had nothing to do with this movie. I was stuck in contact quarantine for three weeks. I got stuck in my room. I started really getting into my head a bit. And I was like, ‘Okay, I’m gonna go home before I start feeling really terrible about myself and what I’m doing, and I’m going to try something new.’ I had no intentions of throwing auditions out there initially. I’d done it in the past when I was around ten years old, just some commercials and modeling and other stuff. But it was actually my mom who encouraged me; she forwarded me an email about local casting, so I just threw my audition tape out there. I was extremely lucky.”
According to Radochia, the casting call for the film, which was shot in Boston in the spring months of 2021, disclosed only that it was a Netflix production, with DiCaprio starring. He soon found himself on the set of a star-studded, $75 million dollar production, but shooting in the midst of a pandemic led to an unconventional shooting experience.
COVID protocols caused director Adam McKay to have an unusual presence on set: “He was more of a voice in the sky. I got to see him sometimes but because of the COVID restrictions, but mostly they just had him outside in a sprinter van. He had full view of every camera on set, and he would just make calls over the loudspeaker. He was like Oz.”
Radochia appears a few times throughout the film, playing one of Dr. Mindy’s (DiCaprio) two sons, but he can most prominently be seen during the film’s climax. The film concludes with Dr. Mindy’s family gathering around the dinner table with their newfound friends Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence), Dr. Teddy Ogelthorpe (Rob Morgan), and a scraggly, Twitch-streaming young man named Yule (Timothée Chalamet) as they wait for Comet Dibiasky to hit Earth.
We asked Radochia about the bittersweet dinner scene towards the end of the movie, what it was like to act with such a star-studded cast, and specifically, how the crew managed to simulate the dining room shaking as the comet hits.
“They installed a rotor at the bottom of the table, but the camera couldn’t pick up enough movement from that. This guy named Mike, an assistant on set, went under the table in between Rob Morgan and I, and literally just kicked his feet against the table. I was literally handing him snacks and water under the table because we were shooting that scene for hours.”
I asked Radochia about Mckay’s process and whether or not Rob himself got to improvise any parts of the script.
“I didn’t get to read the whole script, but I used the lines I got as a guide for who my character was.” Radochia said. His introductory line, ‘I’m a solid 4,’ comes when his onscreen dad, Dr. Mindy asks him to rate how his new antidepressants are working on a scale of 1-10. “That line kind of told me that Evan must take after his dad a bit,” Rob said, referencing Dr. Mindy’s landslide of medications that we see him take here and there throughout the movie.
So how did Radochia’s little knowledge of his character inform his improvised lines?
“During the dinner scene, when we’re all telling stories, Adam gave me a cue over the loudspeaker: ‘Rob, let’s mix it up a bit, try saying you fell asleep in the backyard and then something happened’. I’m like ‘shit, shit, shit, okay, what would Evan Mindy say?’. 20 seconds later, we’re shooting, and I just say ‘I’m thankful for that time I fell asleep in the backyard and woke up face to face with a baby deer,’. I kind of paused for a second, like I wasn’t sure if I was gonna keep going with it, and then I say, ‘that was the best day of my life’.”
The line ended up making it into the final cut of the movie, and it’s not hard to see why. Despite being under the eyes of some of the best actors in Hollywood, our very own Rob Radochia delivered an equally wholesome and bleak line right on the spot.
When we finally caved in and asked Radochia if he had any good anecdotes about working with the actors on set, Rob didn’t disappoint.
“Leo [DiCaprio] had a story every five minutes. He’s done just about everything. In between takes, I was sitting down on the couch and he came up to me and he said, ‘I got to visit Koko the gorilla before she passed.’ and I was like ‘Oh nice’ even though I didn’t even know who Koko the gorilla was.”
“In the movie, he plays someone who completely lacks confidence and has to cope with that by medicating, but that’s not the presence he gives off at all in real life. Usually you’d see people getting into character on set but Leo would just snap into it as soon as the camera rolled and then go back to his normal self between takes.”
Rob is now back at Conn, continuing to push himself into uncharted territory as an actor: “I’m taking an acting course here with Professor Jaffe. That’s a whole different animal. I’ve never done theater in my life before,” he told us humbly. We figure that starring alongside Leo Dicaprio is a pretty good start.
Don’t Look Up is available to stream on Netflix. You can see if it takes home any of the four Academy Awards it is nominated for, including Best Picture, on March 27 on ABC.
