Warning: Major Fresh spoilers ahead.
As highly as we recommend Fresh, Mimi Cave’s tense, twisted, darkly comedic and outright shockingly gruesome horror-thriller, the film also has to come with a warning that its content may make you queasy.
The film’s first 30 minutes could actually easily be mistaken for a romantic comedy as singleton Noa (Daisy Edgar-Jones), discontented by online dating, thinks she may have finally found a keeper after a meet-cute with personable plastic surgeon Steve (Sebastian Stan) in a grocery store’s produce section. That fantasy quickly spirals into a nightmare, though, when (final spoiler warning!) Noa is drugged and wakes up chained in Steve’s basement, where he casually informs her he plans to keep her alive long enough to amputate all of her body parts and sell her meat to an underground network of wealthy cannibals.
In a new interview with Yahoo Entertainment, Stan says he was unfazed by the film’s more disturbing imagery, at least while he was on set. Afterwards, though, was a different story.
“We had an actual former surgeon on set that would kind of watch all the movements and everything, and just the dexterity of that. And then similarly, we had a chef who was watching me, how I was handling everything just from a purpose of keeping it as grounded and realistic as possible,” says Stan (best known for playing Winter Soldier in the Marvel Cinematic Universe), who was joined by Edgar-Jones (Normal People).
“So I feel like I didn’t really have any wake up moments until a month later when I was like, ‘What have we done?! What was that? Why am I still thinking about it?’ Middle of the night, just [wide awake thinking about it]. ‘Oh god, oh god! I ruined my life.’”
Sebastian Stan says the shock of what they filmed in #Fresh didn’t register until well after they wrapped.
“I didn’t really have any wake up moments until a month later when I was like, ‘What have we done?! What was that? Why am I still thinking about it?.. Oh God, oh God!'” pic.twitter.com/4Oan8tRaMU
— Kevin Polowy (@djkevlar) March 9, 2022
For first-time feature director Cave, who adapted a screenplay by Lauryn Kahn, it was a constant dilemma when deciding how much of the story’s graphic nature she would visibly portray.
“I mean, I think it was on my mind every day,” Cave says. “I knew that I was always trying to tow a very fine line and, honestly, a lot of the gore that was on the page is not on screen. So I really knew that with a topic like this, I had to handle it delicately. I think that I actually leaned more into the food aspect rather than the sort of body horror aspect. Because for me, I wasn’t as interested in seeing women’s bodies chopped up on screen, frankly. I thought the message could be driven home a lot more clearly with all of the food symbolism and the fact that we are looking at something that’s very familiar, but we know the contents of it, and it shifts your entire perspective of it.”
Watch our full interview with Cave, Stan, Edgar-Jones and co-star Jojo T. Gibbs above.
Fresh is currently streaming on Hulu.
—Video produced by Jen Kucsak and edited by Jimmie Rhee
Watch the trailer:
