INTERVIEW: KAI LUKE BRUMMER (MOFFIE

I N T E RV I E W

KAI LUKE BRUMMER

INTERVIEWED BY FIONA UNDERHILL

Moffie (directed and cowri�en by Oliver Hermanus) is about Nicholas van der Swart (Kai Luke Brummer), a 16-year-old white South African conscripted into the army to fight in the ‘South African border war’ with Angola in 1981. While training, he meets Dylan Stassen (Ryan de Villiers), a gay man who is sent away to a psychiatric hospital and heavily drugged in an a�empt to ‘cure’ him. Nick struggles with his own sexuality in this extremely challenging environment. We spoke with lead actor Brummer (over zoom, with Brummer in South Africa) about the Full Metal Jacket style training involved to prepare for the role, the different languages spoke and the most challenging and rewarding aspects of making Moffie.

Could you tell me about the audi�oning and cas�ng process first of all?

I wish I had a more interes�ng story to tell! But it came from my agent, I got the slides and went in for an ini�al audi�on. It turned out that I went to, subsequently, eleven audi�ons a�er that. I got seen for a number of different roles and then eventually got Nicholas. So, I think I audi�oned for about a year and a half before I got the role. I kind of got a sense, I don’t why, but when I first read the brief, I felt that Nicholas was my role.

Did you go to an army boot camp, or something similar, to prepare for the role?

Absolutely. So, the produc�on company and Oliver (Hermanus, director) organised for us to go for a week-long boot camp. We stayed overnight, did the army drills and got an understanding of the way that the army worked - different marching procedures, how to clean your weapons and got an insight into what it was like. We had a military advisor on set with us, the same military advisor who took us through the training – they were on set every single day to make sure that we were shoo�ng it as accurately as we could.

Did you get much rehearsal �me with the other actors, especially Ma�hew Vey (Nick’s best friend Sachs) and Ryan de Villiers (Nick’s gay friend Stassen)?

We spent a bit of �me doing the boot camp and then the week a�er that, we spent a week rehearsing and went through the core scenes of the film. So, I got to rehearse with everyone, which was quite a treat.

This must have been a physically challenging role, do you think it helps, as an actor to have something physical to sink your teeth into while you’re ac�ng?

It’s very interes�ng because my father had gone into the army, but we’d never spoken about it before. The only context he’d given me was the fitness behind it and how fit these young men were. So, I kind of went into it with an awareness of what I was ge�ng myself into. I luckily had about three or four months where I got into a shape that was more similar to a Nicholas of the �me - less gym rat and more running fit. Yeah, it’s always helpful to have something that’s tangible for you to sink your teeth into and I think you can see in the film those exercise rou�nes that we went through are real, we shot those.

Were you kept separate from the actors who played the officers to create a barrier between the men and the officers, especially Sergeant Brand?

I think Hilton Pelser (who played Brand) – his process and his discussion with Oliver – they decided that he was going to keep separate. He went fully into his character and stayed in character at all �mes on set, so I didn’t really speak to him. I knew him prior to the film a li�le bit, but then we didn’t really speak to one another throughout the filming process and to be honest, I didn’t really enjoy him (laughs). But I think that added to the layers and the complexity of the rela�onship, with someone who was maybe a year or two older than you deciding how your life con�nues and the safety of your life. I think a lot of the fear in the army during the �me

CREDIT:CURZONHOMECINEMA was that people could disappear and there weren’t many ques�ons or informa�on provided subsequently to those sort of events.

How did you find the fact that the film is in two languages, or did that just come naturally to you?

We in South Africa have eleven official languages, so a different language is not something that I think throws a spanner into the works for me. I’m not an absolutely confidant Afrikaans speaker, but I’ve grown up around Afrikaans and I can understand it fully. It’s just so South African – that there’s always two, three or four different languages happening at the same �me.

I’ve seen films with more than one language, obviously, but what I found interes�ng is that frequently there were conversa�ons where one side was in Afrikaans and one side was in English (eg. Sergeant Brand speaks Afrikaans to Nick and he would reply in English), so we were ge�ng those two sides within the same conversa�on.

It’s a very interes�ng dynamic because obviously there was a lot of tension between English-speaking South Africans and Afrikaans-speaking South Africans, due to the war earlier on. So, it is a divide, but growing up in a postApartheid South Africa, I think that divide is slowly being diminished and we throw different languages into the same sentence. I think if a South African English-speaking person were not to speak Afrikaans in response, it would be more out of respect for the language, of not wan�ng to muddy it or speak it badly.

Did you have to undergo anymore, or any different prepara�on for the final act of the film, when Nick is in ac�ve combat and there’s a �me-jump in the film?

Well, the training had set us up for that, but the situa�on that they set up for us, in terms of having guns going off and the bombs going off, all of that sort of stuff – you don’t really need more than that, it brings you into the present moment pre�y quickly, when things are exploding (laughs). So, we had prepped to use our weapons and we knew how to leprechaun, we knew the different forma�ons that you would undertake during that specific kind of a�ack.

What was the most challenging part of filming, or perhaps even before you started filming?

For me, it is the racial tension that is always the most difficult to deal with. Our history in South Africa is quite dark, but I come from a mixed-race family, I have an adopted Black brother. So, the racial connota�ons that are espoused during the filming really got under my skin. I kept having to remind myself, “I’m in 1981, not 2019” and we think about the world very differently to back then. During that �me, as I think Oliver has said before, informa�on was lesser and fear was greater, so it’s just reminding yourself all the �me that that sort of abuse was normal.

And what was the most rewarding part or aspect of making the film?

For me, the most rewarding part was ge�ng an insight into my father’s genera�on. As I said, we hadn’t spoken about the war and I think there’s so many South African fathers who haven’t spoken about it with their children. We were raised by this undercurrent of men who have gone to war and never spoken about it. So, the most rewarding part was to get a glimpse into my father and his genera�on and what made him.