Cocaine Bear is a horror comedy. There are a lot of horror tropes that we play with in the film. You know, it’s a bear high on cocaine attacking people! But it’s also a really fun character piece. It’s about a great group of people coming together who are very much in over their heads. Everybody is going after the drugs, and nobody realises that the bear got there first.
[Jimmy Warden’s] was so unique, and I thought it really offered an opportunity for me to play on a genre that I hadn’t really considered before, and do something out of the box. My first reaction was ‘I gotta read the real story and understand how much of this is true’. Then I did a deep dive. I thought this bear was collateral damage [] a broken war on drugs. I had a lot of empathy for it. I felt like this film could be the bear’s revenge story.
