Sting Stars Ryan Corr & Alyla Brown Discuss Spiders and Stepparents

While many people might be afraid of spiders, only around 3-6% of the population experience true, debilitating arachnophobia that causes them to have an irrational fear of the eight-legged arthropods. It’s that fear that Australian director Kiah Roache-Turner exploits in his new creature feature horror film, Sting. Starring Ryan Corr and Alyla Browne, the movie focuses on a struggling family that inhabits a run-down Brooklyn apartment building, and the unique spider that’s introduced into their life.

Corr and Browne appear opposite one another as step-father and step-daughter. Any parent knows that navigating a blood relationship isn’t exactly easy, but parenting a step-child adds a certain level of difficulty to an already daunting task. MovieWeb caught up with the pair to discuss Sting, and what it was like to come face-to-face with a giant spider. Along the way, we also touched on working with Kiah Roache-Turner, how it felt to film in Australia, and which of the two is more equipped to tackle a spider infestation.

On Giant Spiders and Taking Advice from Sigourney Weaver

Alyla Browne has already had an amazing career at her young age. She has appeared as Nicole Kidman’s daughter in Nine Perfect Strangers, worked alongside Sigourney Weaver in Prime Video’s The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, and will star next in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga as the younger version of Anya Taylor-Joy’s titular character. This time around, one of her co-stars just happens to be a giant spider created by Richard Taylor and Wētā Workshop, and for Browne, having the creature in front of her made it that much easier to act afraid:

“I think that having that spider there, it changed everything. It made it so much easier to have that fear reaction, to not have to imagine it, but to have a spider in the room, as if there was a real spider. Because it’s not like they added in the eyes or the teeth or anything, they were all there.”

To aid in her performance, Browne was able to obtain advice from one of her previous co-stars, Sigourney Weaver. No stranger to acting alongside otherworldly creatures, Weaver starred as Ellen Ripley in the Alien franchise, and was able to provide the young actress with some tips.

“I actually talked to Sigourney [Weaver] for the scene where the spider is right in my face, because it was inspired by a scene in Alien that she was in. And I was talking to her, and she was just telling me to react to the spider, and to study it like a scientist, and to get your fear from that spider, and to get it from experiences, and to bring it on to that kind of level.”

The Importance of Family in Sting

With an already 20-year career under his belt, Ryan Corr has appeared in a variety of feature films, and most recently starred in HBO’s House of the Dragon, where he portrayed Ser Harwin ‘Breakbones’ Strong. As to what drew him to the role of Ethan in Sting, it was as much about familial relationships as it was about horror. As someone who was raised by step-parents himself, Corr was interested in exploring the dynamic that helped shape him as a person.

“Kiah [Roache-Turner] spoke to me early on about this sort of stemming from his own personal fear of spiders,” explained Corr, “but also of being a parent, and we spoke at great length about where that can go wrong, even when you’re trying to get it right and trying to connect.” He added:

“So it was an element that absolutely drew me to it,
and in my personal life I have two step-parents who have helped raise and support me
, and navigating that relationship, and how important those relationships have been in my life… I’ve been lucky enough to sort of have four parents raise me, so that was a really interesting dynamic to get to explore.”

Working with Wyrmwood’s Kiah Roache-Turner in Australia

When it came time to be directed by Kiah Roache-Turner for Sting, Corr was excited to work with someone he’d been wanting to pair up with since the director’s 2014 film Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead. He says the experience definitely lived up to his expectations, and had nothing but positive things to say about his fellow Australian.

“I think Kiah makes films that are slightly elevated and very genre-specific. He makes films that he wants to see, he makes films that he grew up seeing, and he’s a real cinephile himself,” said Corr. “So seeing his vision on paper, and then trying to manifest that collaboratively with everyone was just the most exciting part about being being in a film like this.”

“I wanted to do it since Wyrmwood,” continued Corr. “I think no one moves the camera quite like Kiah. I think he’s fearless in stepping outside of the box and making films that he wants to make. I felt like sometimes in this film, it felt like the camera was going to crawl up your leg. Kudos to Kiah. He’s a very visceral, sort of fantastical filmmaker, and I don’t think there’s very many of them here.”

By “here,” Corr means Australia, where Sting was filmed at the iconic ABC Studios in Sydney. While the bulk of the time, actors from different countries have to travel to America to apply their craft, this time around Ryan and Alyla got to stay at home. For the young actor, that was undoubtedly one of the best parts about filming Sting, as she only had to travel 20 minutes to get to the set each day:

It was nice. It was very close. I’m just remembering back. Every morning I went out my front door and there was this van that pulled up on my street, and it was around my birthday time, which is November, so it was Spring and so pretty. And driving 20 minutes to the studio…
it was just a really, really fun shoot
.

Alyla Brown Says: Don’t Kill the Spider

Though Australia is known for having a gargantuan number of spiders, the eight-legged critters don’t phase Brown much. While it was Kiah Roache-Turner’s phobia that may have inspired Sting, Brown holds to the belief that spiders should be set free into their natural habitat rather than exterminated. She jokingly professed that she’s going to start a campaign to alert the public to the importance of spiders to the ecosystem.

I’m not afraid of spiders. I know Kiah is terrified. I actually like spiders, and I’m running a campaign that I just decided a second ago that I was going to run called ‘Don’t Kill the Spider,’ so don’t kill the spider, guys.
Just take it outside. We need the spiders
. You never know, you might kill an endangered one, which is even worse. If everyone kills a spider each day, then their numbers will decrease way too much. So be careful and don’t kill them. Just release them with glass, and paper, and tupperware.

“Alyla is actually the best person to go to on how to safely extract a spider from your shower or home into the wild again, you know…to make its little spider families,” Ryan added. Ah, family.

Sting hits theaters on April 12, 2024 from Well Go USA Entertainment.