Hear our full conversation on my podcast “Beyond the Fame.”
Tory Kittles is known as Laroy Wayne in “Sons of Anarchy” (2008-2011), Detective Thomas Papania in “True Detective” (2013), Frederick Douglass in “Harriet” (2019) and currently across Queen Latifah in the CBS crime drama “The Equalizer” (2021-present).
On Friday, his new film, “Among the Beasts,” hits select theaters and Video on Demand.
The action thriller follows a former Marine, L.T., who reluctantly teams with a gangster’s daughter to find her kidnapped cousin, overcoming his own demons as a combat veteran.
“It’s a story of a flawed hero, a former Marine dealing with PTSD,” Kittles told WTOP. “I love the flawed hero. I feel like we are all the flawed heroes of our own stories. I’m also from a military family. My mother was a captain in the military, both of my grandfathers served in wars, so any time a military character comes my way, I give it extra reverence.”
It’s a character like Liam Neeson in “Taken” (2008) or Hugh Jackman in “Prisoners” (2013).
“The fact that we got to explore what it would be like to go looking for a loved one that’s gone missing, what you’d have to do to even get a lead on where they might be, what lines would you cross and what would you do if you came face to face with the people that took them?” Kittles said. “How does that change you? Where does your moral compass go?”
Playing the gangster’s daughter Lola is talented rising star Libe Barer.
“There was a determination, an intelligence, a ferocity inside this very kind, quiet person,” Director Matthew Newton told WTOP. “There was an internal strength that I thought would be great to discover as the movie goes on. She doesn’t walk on screen and you go, ‘Oh, wow, this is a badass.’ … By the end of the film, we discover what that internal strength is.”
Newton previously won the Audience Award at the South By Southwest Film Fest for “From Nowhere” (2016) and directed Julianne Nicholson in “Who We Are Now” (2017).
“When I made ‘From Nowhere’ about three undocumented kids in the Bronx trying to stay in the country and finish high school at the height of 2015, when all those issues came to the forefront, I discovered that if I grounded the story in an issue that meant something to me and made my heart tick, it just made the storytelling a lot more potent,” Newton said.
The slow-burn thriller evolves from an abduction mystery to an action-packed climax, brilliantly using parallel action cutting between two locations for maximum suspense.
“Time is what we use in film, that is our clay,” Newton said, “Having that is a great practical thing, but given the situation that they’re in, there are two enemies. There’s the actual enemy they have to face and there’s also the enemy of making sure that the people they’re trying to save are still alive and well, so they’re fighting both enemies simultaneously.”
Hear our full conversation on my podcast “Beyond the Fame.”
