Chad Michael Collins has starred in the Sniper franchise since 2011’s Sniper: Reloaded; he’s back with Ryan Robbins in the latest entry, Sniper: The Last Stand. He stopped by to chat with me about working on the project.
Hey Chad, how’s things? Been a while…
I’m good. Yeah, it’s good to see you, my man. It’s been a while and glad that we’ve got another fun thing to talk about. You’re a good friend to the franchise and we’ve got a real banger for you, so we’re excited to talk to you yet again all these years later.
That’s actually one of the questions I was going to ask. What do you think the enduring appeal of the franchise is to fans?
That’s a great question. We’re clearly putting something in a bottle and selling it, and I don’t know what exactly that is other than just good old-fashioned American military action films, which apparently just never really go out of style. The response we get from audiences worldwide just shows that there’s just such a strong desire for this, for people to consume their entertainment, and the success we’ve been having with our movies on Netflix when they dropped there in the US kind of solidifies that, so it’s been nice. We’re doing something right, but I think that the whole world appreciates American military action, and we try to put our unique stamp on that corner of the ever-growing market.
In The Last Stand, Brandon has to take on some new responsibilities; can you tell us about that and how has he changed since the last movie?
Yeah, this is a really fun movie for Brandon’s character in that he gets on a plane at the request of his buddy after strong recommendation, finds out that it’s Zero who wanted him to come in and help out with this off-the-books operation, so of course, he arrives and he’s game, but he doesn’t know what he signs up for.
He has to mentor a young, very green, inexperienced sniper and he has to work with an entire crew of elite soldiers that he’s never met before and a mission that he’s playing catch-up on. Things obviously don’t go to plan and Brandon kind of has to step into more of a leadership role and take command of an otherwise fubar situation and for the first time. We see him calling the shots and putting himself, as leaders do, front and center and in harm’s way and leading by example during an Alamo-type Last Stand sequence towards the end of the movie where everything culminates into incredible action. So, it’s a lot of fun in kind of a situation we’ve never seen Brandon have to step into before, so it’s an interesting wrinkle in his character showing more maturity and all the things he’s picked up all the way and all the things he’s learned from the great leaders he’s had for his squads and missions.
Speaking of Zero, you get to work with Ryan Robbins again, so how do you work with him to create that natural on-screen chemistry that you guys have?
Yeah, Ryan Robbins is back as Zero in Sniper: The Last Stand. This is the fourth movie we’ve gotten a chance to work on together since his character was introduced, so it’s really become a fun Butch and Sundance sort of dynamic. We certainly teased out some more of the buddy cop stuff and seen the relationship kind of grow closer as brothers in arms do, so it’s really easy to play off one another and kind of be in alignment each day that we’re shooting. We take our roles and characters in this franchise very, very seriously and have as much fun as possible with it, so I think it’s true of any actors. The more you get a chance to work together and the more great material that they give you to try on for size, you just form a better, personal and professional relationship, and I think that one is on full display here and perhaps the highest stakes type of dynamics we’ve seen Brandon and Zero fight side-by-side by.
You also get to work, although briefly, with the absolute legend, Arnold Vosloo. What’s he like?
He was a great addition to our cast; he kind of plays a, not even the biggest bad, but the bad who sets off the chain of events that leads to our last stand. I only got to work with him for a couple of days as a kind of a corrupt arms dealer and dealing with corrupt politicians who’d come up and invented this sort of new weapon of mass destruction that could change the game, so to speak. In terms of black-market weaponry and terrorist armaments that we have to take down, destroy, eliminate, and make sure the world knows doesn’t exist or is ever replicated again, so he was great. He was in there, he’s hamming it up, he’s got such a presence about him as all these great veteran actors do, so he’s a small welcome addition to our sniper universe.
Oh yeah, for sure. I don’t think I’ve asked you this before, what part of Brandon’s personality do you relate to the most?
It’s funny, there’s a moment in the movie where the rare downtime before getting ready to go into battle and you see Brandon on his bunk reading; he’s more of an introspective guy and he ends up finding himself across from a character called Nova, who’s our resident hacker leading a resistance against this corrupt regime in his country that we’re fighting to liberate. And the director, Daniska Esterházy, asked me, what book do you think Brandon would be reading? And I picked Marcus Aurelius’ Reflections from a Stoic. I think Stoic philosophy just fits Brandon right, you know? Being a sniper is such an internal mental game. You have to have such strong mental faculties and obviously the ability to compartmentalize with taking out hostiles and bad guys and just stuffing that away in a way that if you’re good at your job, they never see it coming and they don’t know what hit them, you know? And so I think that the mental component to Brandon is always something that’s never been lost on me. I thought that was a really fun scene that she let me collaborate on just in the choice of the book because I think it really resonates with me personally, but it seems to fit the character in terms of the virtues, the ancient Greek and Roman philosophies, character, integrity, honour, and we’ve seen Brandon play out those themes again and again and again across all his movies.
Just before a scene, how do you get into character? How do you become Brandon?
It’s like slipping on an old, comfortable pair of combat boots at this point. We’ve been doing it since 2010, something crazy like that. This is, gosh, is it the eighth or ninth movie? I’ve been a part of Sniper 4 and now this is Sniper 11. And so yeah, eight movies in the can for me as Brandon. So, it’s really about how can we tap into something deeper? How can we add just another layer on top of who we already know him as and what he’s already done and accomplished? And so, I love this script in particular for The Last Stand just because it did see him kind of be a bit more of a mentor for the first time and then step into a leadership role for the first time. I just thought that was an incredible opportunity to expand upon the character and see him in these brand-new situations and what he does with it. So, I don’t know, for me, it’s easy to remember where we came from because I’ve been doing it for so long and it’s fun for me to get excited about where we’re now taking him, just adding an extra little bit of layer on that character after all these years.
Yeah, it feels like a natural progression for him to go into the leadership position at this stage. Do you still like to try and do as many of your own stunts as possible?
(laughs) Yeah, I had a fan and a supporter post online the end credits and we all had stunt doubles on this film but for some reason, I don’t think mine got credit because we didn’t need the guy. So, I was able to do 100% of all my own stunts for this. They didn’t ask me to do anything too crazy. I ran on the edge of a building with a leash line attached to me and I did all my own big fight scenes, my one versus three fight scene myself, obviously all the shooting and the prep fall, rolling, diving, sliding and stuff like that. I do all on my own. So, they didn’t ask me to do anything exceptionally crazy. I was commenting online before that Ryan has a great stunt double as well and I think they used him for like one little scene when there was a door that gets blown up and slams him backwards. So, maybe there was a safety issue there in terms of an explosive device. But other than that, he does all of his own and I think most of the actors typically do that. We were lucky on this one that we didn’t need to throw my doppelganger in there but he was available and is a great guy to work with, to prepare and train with and get the moves and the choreography down with. But I always try to do 100% of my own. It’s just better for the editor, better for the director. And that’s no knock on the incredible stunt teams that we always work with. But if an actor can do most of it himself, it always usually makes for an easier time putting it all together.
I was reading that there were actual military experts involved with the choreography; is that true?
Yeah, a lot of these guys come from a military background, obviously very martial arts background. We have the technical advisors on set who are former military as well and they’re just a great resource on every single film. But when it comes to the hand-to-hand stuff, the stunt choreographers who are so well-versed in that step in, but you also have to have a knowledge of guns and gunplay because we’re doing things like disarms and we’re doing things like taking a guy who’s got a handgun and redirecting shots, shooting his own people on his side. There’s a certain level of technicality that makes us, I suppose, that Krav Maga self-defence martial arts meets military tactical weapons training there. Almost all those guys have a really diverse and varied background across all that stuff.
Some people might not be aware but the location in the film is the imaginary Costa Verde. I was wondering, is that a deliberate reference the Val Verde universe from Die Hard, Lethal Weapon and Commando? I feel like this now takes place in the same universe as those movies.
(laughs) Yeah, I mean, look, that’s good company but you’d have to ask the writer. I think that was established a few movies ago when I think it was Assassin’s End where Brandon gets framed for killing a president or a prime minister, a diplomat and of the fictional Costa Verde and then he has to go on the run and clear his name. That’s where we meet Lady Death and everybody else, Kari Andrews directed film. So, that was kind of a lightly touched on in that movie. And it’s kind of fun that they brought this all the way back around and saw kind of a dictator step in into the assassinated politician’s place. And that’s somebody who’s corrupt to the bone and that’s why we’re called in to hopefully liberate the people from that tyranny and corruption. It was a fun callback to something that had just been lightly touched on in a previous movie. That was cool.
So basically, you need Arnie to come in as John Matrix at some point in the future.
(laughs) Exactly, right.
How was working with Danishka as the director?
She was fantastic. I think it’s nice because the audiences who are so kind and generous are loving this but the critics seem to also be really responding very, very well to this as a really entertaining, complete action movie. And that’s all credit to her and our guy Daniel at Sony. She was incredibly prepared, as someone who’s graciously watched all or most of our Sniper movies. I think you can agree that we kind of doubled and tripled down on the amount of action and action pieces that we put in this movie alone. I mean, I think we had a kill count, of like 70 people. We’re blowing up cars where everyone was shooting. I mean, I think we shot over 1600 or 2000 rounds in terms of the firefight stuff. So, they really tripled down on the action elements. And that’s a lot. I know our writer and our director had an entire spreadsheet of how many bullets were in each cartridge on every single extra character. Like every time a bullet gets shot, it went into their spreadsheet because, you don’t wanna see somebody in and out shooting 32 rounds out of a 11-clip mag on a Beretta (laughs). So, they were really trying to keep it hyper real and realistic and that comes with an incredible degree of preparation. When you’re dropping 70 bodies in a film, there needs to be so much attention paid to all the things and all the action pieces, so she was incredible. She was incredibly prepared, very collaborative on just about every single scene, letting me and Ryan in particular, who established these characters and been playing them for quite a while, letting us put our stamp on things, little dialogue tweaks if we felt that it fit the scene better. Couldn’t have been more awesome to work with.
It must be quite stressful for the filmmakers because you have the military people who aren’t involved in movies, but they’ll watch the movies and they’ll be judging and saying, “that gun wouldn’t fire this much” and they’ll be sure to tell you.
Yeah, no, they’re so open-minded and so with the writer, Sean Wathen, who’s fantastic and wrote a great script for us, and Danishka, the director, they were so approachable. I’d come up and be like, “hey, look, like I know it’s scripted this way and I know you see the scene this way, but I just want to let you know, there’s going to be very particular eyes on the back end here. And we never want to alienate our military service men and women and veterans that they do watch in a very different way”. I put the hyper-focus lens on these military action movies. So, sometimes we have to go away from an initial direction, that’s movie action and we have to try to ground it in a bit of realism that’s not going to spit an audience member like that out. They were always very incredibly open to it, which is good because you definitely want to make the most entertaining movie you can, which you also don’t want to cross so many egregious fictional lines that you’re kind of triggering the base who lived and breathed it. And they’re seeing some egregious missteps on set. So, it’s a sweet spot that we try to find for every movie.
Yeah. How do you handle working on the long hours and how do you manage a downtime on set?
You know, there’s not many days off. We’re working on a pretty conservative, modest budget for what we’re trying to achieve. So even if there’s a rare off day or half day, I’m usually thrown in the lines then with a stunt group and rehearsing for the next fight or the next sequence. So, off days are not so much off days. It just means I’m not in front of a camera that day. But you try to hit the gym, stay, get your rest, get the good food in you and do all that other sort of stuff. But I don’t know, man, I’ve never lost my joy for this. I’m pretty tireless when it comes to this. Sure, the days can be long, exhausting but at the same time, what’s the alternative? Working a job, you hate or God forbid, retail (laughs) or going back to an office where I spent the first 15 years of my LA experience. And so, no matter how tired and how long the days and weeks go, I know that it’s an absolute blessing to do what I do. And the alternative sucks way worse. I’m pretty inexhaustive when it comes to filming these things, because I’m totally in my G.I. Joe pretend joy. So, it never gets old. It’s a total boy’s dream, kind of doing movies like these.
It really is. So final question, then, what else do you have coming up?
Yeah, this year, we’ll see the release finally of a couple of movies I did way back in at the end of I think 2023. The trailer just dropped for a movie called Desert Dawn. And that has Kellen Lutz and Cam Gigandet, where I get to play one of the heavies, one of the bad guys and so I’m really excited for that movie to come out. I think it’s going to be released May of 2025. That was a fun one to shoot over in Las Vegas with Al Bravo Films. I did another one with them that hopefully should be coming out soon called The Wrecker, which has Harvey Keitel and Tyrese Gibson and Danny Trejo. And just a really, really fun, great cast. And it’s pretty heavy on the action and has a badass souped up war machine tow truck (laughs). I’ll leave it at that until more official details are released. So, two action films will be dropping in 2025. I did another project this last fall with those same great people. That’s more of a military action movie that should also be dropping maybe this year or next. So, that’s kind of what I got upcoming.
Excellent. So, busy time ahead then. Well, thanks for taking the time to chat; been good to finally catch up.
You’ve always been very friendly to our franchise, man. So, I always make the time to shoot the breeze and catch up proper like gentlemen.
Yes, absolutely. Well, best of luck with the upcoming projects and we’ll chat again soon.
All right. Thanks a lot. Bye!