Director Johannes Roberts opted for old school practical effects as much as possible with Primate, including a killer chimp played by a creature performer. An impossibly adorable family pet, Ben, transforms into a terrifying predator via stunning practical effects from Millennium FX. But it’s movement specialist Miguel Torres Umba who inhabits the creature suit and imbues […]
Director Johannes Roberts opted for old school practical effects as much as possible with Primate, including a killer chimp played by a creature performer.
An impossibly adorable family pet, Ben, transforms into a terrifying predator via stunning practical effects from Millennium FX. But it’s movement specialist Miguel Torres Umba who inhabits the creature suit and imbues Ben with a cuddly then unsettling personality.
It turns out that Umba was a rare find who completely unlocked Ben as the film’s formidable antagonist.
“We’d done this test for the idea of going practical,” Johannes Roberts told Bloody Disgusting. “We had a rough suit. As the creature, we’d used this 14-year-old girl to just test the suit out for the scale and see that it worked. And it was great, but she just didn’t have the physicality that you need. She was very good. She was the daughter of a creature performer and was excellent, but didn’t have the physicality. So, we were like, ‘Okay, well, we need the physicality, but we can’t have the Rock as a chimpanzee’ kind of thing. So, we did an open casting and then Miguel just came in, never done anything before, and he just blew the doors off.”
The filmmaker recalls his creature performer’s audition. “There was this bar that was sticking out of the wall, and he just leapt up, climbed all the way up the wall, was hooting and hollering, and then jumped all the way down. It was just like, ‘Oh, yeah, this is the guy.’ He just went full chimp. He went there. Don’t know if he’s ever come back. That just changed the movie from that moment on, really, because the chimp then wasn’t just a shape or a background thing. It was a personality, and the scenes just evolved from that.”