“My character is not exactly an ideal person,” said Matthew Daddario about his character Ben in Into the Deep. Ben is mostly a stranger to Jess (Ella-Rae Smith), who he spends the night with on his boat after they meet that day. The next morning Jess wakes up and Ben has ventured them further out into the sea. She’s scared at first, but he eventually convinces her to spend the summer with him on his boat. They’re soon interrupted by a collision with Lexie (Jessica Alexander), unconscious on a sea-doo. They bring her onboard and help her until they wind up partying, as they can’t return to land because Ben’s boat engine isn’t working.

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Ben brings out drugs and suggests they all take some. They all agree, despite some initial reluctance from Jess, but Lexie fakes taking hers and quickly disposes of it. Jess wakes up hazy and hungover and looks for Ben and Lexie. She finds Ben unconscious in the engine room. Lexie erupts into the room with blood on her head proclaiming that the engine worked all along and that Ben was lying, threatened her, and tried to assault her. Jess must now decide who is telling the truth in order to survive while greater context is revealed.

“He’s not the nicest guy out there,” continued Daddario, “he sells himself well… generally I play characters that are nicer, usually more the good guy type. This was a departure from that for sure, which is something I’ve been trying to do for a while.”

Matthew Daddario on his Character Ben

Ben doesn’t have a diabolical motive, rather, is “indifferent,” as Daddario put it. He was able to layer his performance well in Into the Deep, which he credited to studying and picking up on patterns from other people.

“The first thing I do when I’m reading a script is try to figure out who they remind me of, like somebody that I’ve met in real life. Sometimes that can be a good thing… in this case, it’s not like that. So, I had to think of people that I find truly detestable, truly awful, people who say one thing and they mean something entirely different. And I found certain similarities between their patterns of behavior, how they think about things. It gets fun. It’s a sort of fun to try and find those little elements that we don’t notice all the time, but if you’ve met enough of them, you really understand. Sort of like if you have enough experience with a certain kind of not-so-good, you feel something is not quite right… this is making my stomach turn a little bit… and that’s where I went for those things, were the people that make my stomach turn a little in a creepy, charismatic way.”

“What I wanted Ben to be was truly and casually indifferent about the well-being of others. He was driven by a kind of narcissism that doesn’t really recognize themselves. It’s not like he sits back and goes, ‘Oh, this is deliciously evil.’ It’s almost a compulsion that he doesn’t truly see. He doesn’t see what’s wrong with him,” added Daddario.

Working with Ella-Rae Smith, Jessica Alexander, and Kate Cox

     Lionsgate

“I always tell people that I seem to get lucky. Everyone I work with, I’ve had very few people or anything I’ve done that have been a problem at all. And these two are great,” commented Daddario on working alongside Smith and Alexander.

“They’re really great, and that’s also super important because there were three of us with just a little time on the boat. Everybody was ready to do everything they had to do. It’s a stressful environment filming anyway, under any circumstances, filming on a boat requires a lot of fall rules… and these two were just so good at it. They were good at handling it and dealing with it in a way that sort of supports each other also, because that moment when you’re kind of like, ‘I’m going to lose it soon, we’ve been out here for a while, it’s cold and wet, the boat is rocking in those swells,’ and you see that they’re not breaking, so you don’t break. You don’t shift your behavior. You’re there to work and focus… despite the difficulties of it, it was honestly one of my best filming experiences and I should thank them for that because they’re definitely a part of it,” said Daddario.

He also shared similar sentiments for their director Kate Cox, commenting that she is a “fantastic director,” and that he would “recommend anyone to work with her if they get the opportunity.”

Into the Deep comes to us from Lionsgate and is available in theaters, on demand, and digital as of August 26, 2022.