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25th March 2025
12:05pm GMT
While Jack Quaid has been involved in plenty of fight scenes thanks to his lead role in the superhero series The Boys, the action in his new movie Novocaine still proved challenging.
In cinemas this week, the film sees the on-the-rise actor play Nathan Caine - a mild-mannered man living with a real-life condition known as CIPA, which means he is unable to feel physical pain.
Terrified of accidentally hurting himself and not realising it, he lives a quiet melancholy existence as an assistant manager at a bank in San Diego.
His life is only brightened when he meets and falls for Sherry (Amber Midthunder, Prey), one of his colleagues. However, just as a romance appears to be blossoming between the two, their bank is robbed by a group of vicious criminals (led by Ray Nicholson) who wind up taking Sherry hostage.
Out of love, Nathan spontaneously decides to pursue the gang of murderous thieves and turn his unique condition into an advantage.
Novocaine puts a very fun and refreshing twist on the action genre. This is thanks to the charm and chemistry conjured by Quaid and Midthunder and the movie's quirky premise which leads to some brilliantly chaotic fight scenes.
Because Nathan is an ordinary man being put through the wringer in some impressively over-the-top ways, his fighting style is much scrappier than typical for Hollywood pictures.
But also because the character can't feel pain, he reacts differently to how audiences might expect. Even though he endures many grisly injuries that would have even John Wick reeling, he never flinches - only ever seeming frustrated by the inconvenience.
Ahead of the action flick, JOE spoke to the cast of Novocaine - including Quaid and Midthunder - as well as the movie's directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen (Significant Other, Villains).
The directing duo explained that the film's premise meant that they and their stunt coordinator had to develop a new fight language for Quaid which they dubbed 'Nate fu'.
Berk said of the action scenes: "That was one of the elements that drew us to the project in the first place - how unique the action in this movie could play out for the two reasons you just said.
"This is a character that has no combat facilities and because of that we had to work with our stunt coordinator Stanimir Stamatov to almost build a whole new fight language that we called 'Nate fu' which is sort of just like survival fighting, just scrappy chaotic survival fighting.
"It just, to us, is a really relatable access point to fight design because it feels like what we would do since we don't know how to fight. You'd be grabbing anything that's not bolted down in a room and throwing it and just throwing lettuce and flour and whatever else you can get your hands on.
"And while it made covering those fight scenes a little bit of a complex endeavour, with set resets and all of the sort of things that come into play when you're shooting a fight scene, it also does create a really unique kind of action scene."
Berk said it was really important to him and Olsen that Novocaine "set itself apart" from a wave of recent action movies that they love but also feel are "kind of blending together".
He told JOE: "You can only so many times see a movie with a high school principal that was secretly an assassin and now they have to fight their way through the school or whatever.
"Those movies are really impressive from a choreography standpoint but there is for us at least a little fatigue with that.
"You kind of want to see an action movie that just does the whole thing through a different prism and we were really drawn to this project for that reason."
As for Quaid, he found preparing for these chaotic action scenes where he couldn't show pain particularly "intense", stating: "It's the first time I've really done a bunch of action in that way."
Helping him through the process though was his co-star Midthunder, already an action icon after having faced off against a Predator alien in 18th-century America in the acclaimed 2022 flick Prey.
When JOE asked Quaid about the prep, he was quick to credit his "amazing stunt team" and Midthunder - saying of the latter: "I was at the premiere of Prey and she's such an action badass in her own right."
Turning to her, he added: "It was really cool to have you also to lean on in those moments where I was like: 'I don't know if I can do this,' and you were like: 'You got this.'"
In response, Midthunder assured him: "Stop, because you were killing it," before telling JOE: "It was so cool for me to be able to watch him do this.
"You've never seen action like this before. I think the only time you see action on someone who can't feel pain is within the superhero context.
"So, for this to be on like a normal person, especially somebody like Nate who is really not built for that, it's so unique.
"I had a lot of questions about how it was gonna go and to see the way that Jack and the stunt team put it together and executed it so creatively and beautifully and perfectly... [Jack's] a star. He's an action star."
However, Quaid and his directors note that they cared just as much, if not more, about nailing the central romance in Novocaine.
When JOE pointed out to Quaid that both Novacaine and his earlier 2025 hit film Companion are twists on the romance genre, Midthunder jokingly called him "the people's edgy date man".
Responding, Quaid said surprised: "The people's edgy date man! That's my new title," before adding: "With both of those projects, I just really responded to the script. I think the romance angle, it's not necessarily something I look for but it helped both of those movies so much.
"Companion obviously deals with toxic relationships and I think it's a very interesting topic to hang the whole movie on. And I think with [Novocaine] the romance sells the action better and I think that it improves the action.
"I think the movie lives or dies on whether or not you believe in Sherry and Nate's relationship and we rehearsed those scenes. Like, the first third of the movie is essentially a romcom and I remember us doing two weeks of rehearsals for all those scenes, about as much as I rehearsed for the action scenes to be honest.
"Because we knew that nobody would care about Nate or Sherry or the action if you didn't want to see these two together.
"I loved that when I first met with the directors, they were like: 'We care just as much, if not more, about the romance than we do the action and I was like: 'These guys have the right idea. I have to be a part of this thing.'"
Expanding on Quaid's comments, co-director Olsen said that Novocaine's more character-focused opening stretch showcasing Nathan's melancholy existence and his blossoming romance with Sherry was "vital".
"The whole movie sort of falls apart if you don't buy that this guy would put his life on the line to save a woman that he's really just gone on one date with," he explained.
"So you can't do that unless you set up where he is initially, that he's in this isolated place and he's forced to live this kind of hermetic lifestyle because of the condition that he has. If he were somebody without a rare disorder and who had three or four long-term relationships and this was just another somebody he met on Tinder, I don't think you'd buy him going and doing that.
"But when you can see his life and the isolated nature of it and you really understand what a ray of sunshine Sherry is when she enters his life and how it changes everything, I think that's what makes you go along for this ride and buy that he would put himself on the line to go out and save her because she changed his entire outlook on his life."
Olsen also said he and Berk wanted Novocaine to have "a throwback feel to it of the late '80s, early '90s action movies" that they loved, where audiences tended to spend more time with the characters "before the action kicked in".
"In Air Force One, the hijacking isn't taking place until you're 25 minutes into the movie," Olsen said.
"A lot of times you are pressured as a writer and as a filmmaker nowadays to get that action quick. We've got to get to it by 10 minutes or else somebody might switch to a different streamer or something like that.
"But we wanted to design this movie for a theatrical experience. And that doesn't just mean the fun of the screens and gasping and grabbing at each other, which the movie does have, [it's] also knowing that you'll have the time to sit there and get to know these characters so that the rest of the movie you're invested in them.
"I think if the action in this movie started at the 12th minute, you wouldn't care as much and that [it] would kind of just unravel.
"I think audiences are smart enough and patient enough to sit there and be able to take in the first 25 minutes of this movie which are basically a rom-com before it kicks off and goes to a whole other gear."
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