Theo Rossi On The Logistics Of Radicalization In “Come With Me” (Exclusive)

Theo Rossi in Come With Me (Vertical Entertainment)

“The only show that tells the truth. The only place asking the big questions and finding the big answers. Answers they don’t want you to hear.”

The first sentences from Dalton Kirby, played to narrated perfection by Ron Perlman, sound like any talk radio host you’d hear on your drive home, or any talking head you’d see before the next Presidential briefing. The political discourse of our time has been dominated by the fringe; bad actors who’d have you believe that nothing, no one, was safe from the shadowy, unnamed “them”.

Come With Me, starring Theo Rossi as Simon Ward, a man who finds himself under Kirby’s spell as his world begins to unravel. The farther he falls into Kirby’s ranks, the less connected he becomes with reality, causing a cataclysmic shift and a decision that puts him on a dangerous path. The story presents Ward not as an outward villain, or even a stereotypical stooge who lacks critical analysis skills. Rossi brilliantly plays Ward in the gray void, and found that Ward’s was a story he wanted to tell.

“I just like movies that make you feel something,” Rossi tells me during our conversation for Foundation.

“I want people to debate. I want people to have like an opinion. I want people to feel whether they're good, bad, angry, sad. I want them to like question and I think art should induce feeling and emotion. That film, we knew when we were making it that it was going to be something that people were gonna go, ‘Oof, okay’.”

Rossi says he wanted the audience to feel the force of Ward’s slow descent into madness and ask themselves a simple question: Is Simon a hero or a villain? Is he innately evil, or was he pushed to radicalization because of his surroundings? Rossi says he doesn’t see Simon as a villain, but as the victim of the present day realities of our consumer culture.

“We can just have someone telling us what we want to hear in an echo chamber all day, every day, and that is so dangerous because if you have a belief, even if it's wrong for society, let's say, you can have it reconfirmed over and over and over because of the algorithm of the same stuff that told you that. thing. You're gonna get it hammered on top of you. If you're someone that searches workout stuff, you're gonna get hammered with workout stuff all the time. It's gonna be all different stuff. You don't know if it's true or false. You're just getting hit with it because the way the system works now. So I feel like he's a victim of a system.”

The film, directed masterfully with harrowing discomfort by Aaron Harvey, paints a stark picture so close to reality, you can almost immediately think of a handful of situations and people just like Simon Ward. While it’s an indictment of our current political landscape as well as the basis of those who profit from creating the collateral damage, Rossi prides himself in what he calls an apolitical performance, and thinks viewers see it that way, too, even if they reach conclusions he doesn’t necessarily align with.

“I've seen people kind of go on both sides, and I like that because it's stirring up that conversation where some people go, oh, Simon's part of the manosphere. No, he's just a guy! He's just a guy who got caught up by this, and again, I don't think Dalton Kirby even knew what he was doing because you think about it, not to ruin anything, but when Simon goes to the radio station and he's asking about him and then they're like, ‘Are you a donor?’ Like, it's all about the money. It's just a business.”

A compelling drama filled with intense action, sadness, and superb acting, Come With Me will leave you as speechless as it will reflective. Rossi loves the idea of the film becoming the catalyst for conversation among viewers as a way to ignite conversation about art, its statements, and its core. He says much like paintings and songs, viewers will have a completely different interpretation of Simon’s actions, his radicalization, and his mindset after walking away from the film, and he wants the film to spark that dialogue about who people really are, and how much gray area exists between a person’s soul and a person’s actions.

“I think that when you leave art a little open, just a crack, it makes you have conversations. We're so spoon-fed in our things right now of like, this is why he did this, and every bad guy is only a bad guy because something happened to them when they were young. There are no just bad guys, and there are no just good people. Everything is so manufactured; it's like we don't trust the audience to have the dinner conversation or the parking lot walk anymore, and I refuse to play into that. Anytime I have a hand in creating something, whether that be as an actor, or whether it be as a producer, or whether it be as a writer, I have to create it where I give the audience a little more credit for being intelligent to kind of have a debate and to have a conversation.”

Come With Me, starring Theo Rossi, Ronnie Gene Blevins, Kate French, and Ron Perlman, can be streamed now on Amazon Prime Video and AppleTV.