English actor, comedian and screenwriter Nick Frost (Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead) has recently starred in the comedy horror film Krazy House opposite Alicia Silverstone, which premiered at Sundance, in U.K. comedy Seize Them! alongside Aimee Lou Wood and Nicola Coughlan and can currently also be seen in Alice Lowe’s Timestalker. Fans can also soon catch him in Shudder’s supernatural horror Black Cab.
Sky Original Film just unveiled that it will bring his horror comedy Get Away, which he wrote, produced and in which he stars with Aisling Bea, Sebastian Croft, and Maisie Ayres, among others, to Sky Cinema in 2025. Plus, he will be seen next year in another Sky film, called Grow, about the world’s biggest pumpkin. And that’s not even everything on Frost’s plate.
Does he just not sleep much or does he maybe have clones? “There’s three of me,” Frost responds to THR with a joke before sharing: “It probably shows that I’m deeply afraid of not working. I think after COVID I didn’t shoot anything for two years. Just nothing came in, and so I was kind of frightened for that period. I’d worked constantly for 20 years essentially. So, I think there’s probably a fear of that again.”
Speaking of horror leads us right to his newest film, Get Away, which mixes scares with laughs in ways Frost fans have come to expect. “A family’s vacation to a remote getaway takes an unexpected turn when they discover the island they’re on is inhabited by a serial killer,” reads a synopsis of the film.
While the film was shot in Finland, the story is set on a Swedish island that is rooted in actual experiences. “Over the last 20-odd years I’ve been going to a tiny island in the Baltic Sea in Sweden and spent a lot of Christmases there, lots of summers, Easter,” the star explains. “There are 40 houses. There’s one shop, and in the summer there’s a restaurant. There are no cars. You’d like to think that after that amount of time and seeing the same people year in, year out you’d get to know them more or they’d let you in a little bit more and you’d learn a bit more about them and who they are as people. But I never learned anything. They didn’t let me in at all.” The islanders in the movie mirror that approach. “It was just about that island essentially and how those communities are very insular and probably keep it so for the balance of their community,” Frost explained.
How about the island house that the film family rents as accommodation? Yes, it was also based on real-life experiences. “I like Airbnbs,” Frost says. “But my wife and I went to one in Greece run by two very old people, and they just kept emerging and coming into the house, and we didn’t understand what they were saying. My wife was pregnant at the time, and they kept bringing her food and stuff and they’d be talking to us in Greek and touching her stomach, and I’d be whispering, ‘Don’t eat it.'”
He also quips how every Airbnb has “a cupboard with tape on it that says ‘do not enter,'” but in his real-life case one such cupboard was left open, and he immediately noticed 10 surveillance monitors in it. Frost used all this as inspiration for the film.
Did he ever consider shooting Get Away on the Swedish island he has so much experience with? “Yes, I did,” Frost shares. “I spoke to an elder one day when I was just jumping on the ferry to say, ‘I’ve got this idea.’ This was five years ago or so. And the only thing he said to me was: ‘You shouldn’t sh*t where you eat.’ Now that was that.”
Frost put together the cast for the project, especially the core Smith family, based on a mix of new connections and work history. Take Bea, for example. “We went and had a really nice dinner, and within 10 minutes of sitting down, we just got really quite deep quite quickly. And we laughed a lot and realized that there were a lot of similarities in terms of how we got to where we are and our sensibility,” he recalls.
And that is key for creative collaborations, such as film and TV. “What it comes down to with films I make is: Do I want to spend seven weeks with you doing something which is really quite difficult?” Frost explains. “And sometimes the answer to that is I just like doing it so much that I don’t want to do it with you. But with Aisling, it was like ‘Yeah, I totally want to do that.'”
Meanwhile, Croft he knew from their past work together. “We’d done three or four films before, and I wrote the part [of his character’s son] for him,” Frost tells THR. “And then we were really lucky to find Maisie [as the daughter]. We looked to quite a few people for her part, but as soon as she cropped up in the box on the Zoom, everyone was like, ‘who is this?!’ And that was on a Friday morning. The director said, ‘She has a job starting next week, so if you want her, you need to offer it today.’ And everyone was just like: ‘yeah, she’s the one!’ And she brought it.”
The group’s chemistry also came naturally, the writer, producer and star recalls. “We became a bit of a family,” says Frost. “We have a WhatsApp group, which is called The Smith Family. Obviously, you want an actor to come on board and do the lines and act in the film, but what you don’t pay for is all the extra bits that people bring, and they bring it because they like the characters or they like the job or they enjoy and feel comfortable enough on a set that they feel happy enough to bring stuff that they’ve been thinking about.”
Frost prefers it like that on the sets of films he creates. “I love the fact that we all sit and do our homework, and as we’re learning the dialogue, there might be a little thing where we’re thinking: ‘This would be funny. Let’s try this!’ And for actors to come and say, ‘Hey, do you mind if I try this?’ I’m really proud of that because it means people are comfortable enough to put themselves out there a bit.”
Not that Frost needs to have full control. Get Away director Steffen Haars has also worked with him on Krazy House. “I’m happy to just hand it over to a certain point,” Frost says. “Steffen is such a great director, and I trust him. If you are going to collaborate with someone, you need to be brave enough to hand it over.”
Get Away has some twists and turns, surprises that seem difficult to achieve in a genre with such a long tradition. One one of those was “the first thing I had” when developing the movie, Frost recalls. “We all know everything about every film at this point, so it’s about trying to keep a twist under wraps.”
About his writing work, he also shares: “In the room where I write, there’s a TV, and the first thing I do is I put (horror streamer) Shudder on (which will get Get Away in the U.S. next year), and then I spend six hours with horror films on in the background and I’ll write.”
Frost doesn’t mind answering questions about his busy schedule, including some of his upcoming movies as an actor that he didn’t write himself, such as the How to Train Your Dragon live-action film. “I play Gerard Butler‘s best friend Gobber who mans a forge making weapons for the Vikings,” he says. “I can’t really say much, but it was such a fantastic experience. It was four or five months in Belfast with Gerard Butler and Mason Thames [who plays Hiccup] who are fantastic, just having a laugh and being Vikings. Everyone was very aware that everyone loves the animated films, and Dean DeBlois is the same director who directed the animated versions. So it was about being respectful.”
Frost is also in a Star Wars project, playing droid SM 33 in Lucasfilm’s Disney+ series Skeleton Crew which is set to debut at the end of the year. “This is one of those things that if I could show 11-year-old me in a time mirror that I will be seen as a robot in Star Wars — it’s a bucket list thing to at least be somewhere in that universe. And I got a message from Jon Favreau to say just, ‘because you’re a robot doesn’t mean that you can’t appear somewhere as yourself.'”
Frost isn’t taking a rest though. “I’m writing something now,” he shares. “It is another horror comedy but not a slasher — it has more of a supernatural vibe.”
Could he maybe even direct this one? “I could shut up and just direct a film. Maybe that’s next,” Frost, 53, says. “But I don’t want to direct something just to say I’ve directed a film. I’d want to be good at it. It would have to be a story that I’d want to tell and something that I’d want to write and that I’ve been thinking about for a long time.”
Ultimately, the star is just happy and excited to keep creating. “I’m really grateful to be where I am because I love what I do,” Frost concludes. “I love making films. And I’m probably the best version of myself when I’m on a set.”
English (US) ·