Love Hurts stars Ke Huy Quan and Ariana DeBose, as well as Director Jonathan Eusebio, unpack the film’s incredible stunt sequences.

From the producers of the groundbreaking action films Nobody, Violent Night, Bullet Train, Atomic Blonde and The Fall Guy comes a visceral, high-octane story of wrath and revenge. 87North is known for their incredible stunt work so it should come as no surprise that Love Hurts is packed to the brim with epic and exciting stunt sequences.

First time Director Jonathan Eusebio has a stunt coordinator background, as does lead actor Ke Huy Quan, putting the icing on the cake when it comes to making sure the stunts are memorable – and performed perfectly.

We spoke with Ke Huy Quan, co-star Ariana DeBose, and director Jonathan Eusebio, unpacking all of the Love Hurts stuntwork.

The Entire Cast Did The Majority Of Their Own Stunts

Tessa Smith: Ke Huy Quan has a stunt background as well. How helpful was that during your collaboration?

Jonathan Eusebio: Well that’s what made it fun. I already knew his background. So when we were looking for someone who can play Marvin, he was the ideal choice. Without hesitation. We were watching him on his Oscar push and all his speeches and his comeback, and we’re like, “That’s the guy. Everyone’s going to root for him on screen.”

His background just made it easier because we didn’t have a really long shoot schedule. So you need performers that can do the physical action. I knew they could do the emotional journey of the actors no problem. But to do this type of action, usually it takes months and months to train people. We didn’t have that much time. So I had to make sure my cast physically could do the stuff that we wanted them to do.

Anything, fight, that’s all Ke. He’s doing 90-something percent. I don’t want to kill my lead actor, but fighting, everything, all the action sequences, he’s doing 98% of it. Same with the rest of the cast. All of them did most of their stuff. I was very proud of that, too. I think what makes it great is emotionally they can do this stuff, but I wanted to show off their physical prowess, too. 

Ke Huy Quan Says You “Can’t Fake It” In Terms Of Stunts

Tessa Smith: How much did your stunt background help while filming Love Hurts?

Ke Huy Quan: I don’t think I could have done it without the knowledge that I acquired as an action choreographer. Also, when I was a kid, I love this genre. I love watching those old Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung movies  where they did all the fights themselves. That’s really what inspired this movie. It’s kind of like our homage to that era. 

It was a lot of fun, but also it was really difficult to make. I got so many bruises and aches and pains. But I come from a school where in order to make a fight look good, you can’t fake it because the audience is so sophisticated now. They recognize if you don’t go at it. And that’s what we did in this movie. We really went all out.

Ariana DeBose’s Background As A Dancer Helped Her With Her Stunts

Tessa Smith: I was told you did all of your own stunts in Love Hurts?

Ariana DeBose: I did. I even learned how to drive a stick. I learned how to drive a stick in about an hour. I was like, boo boo, what you need? Let’s go. I will give it a go. 

But I loved it. I freed myself from holding back on this one. I was like, I will try everything. I have a very strong skill set. I’m very coordinated. My background as a dancer was very helpful. Because to me, it’s the same palette. You’re just using different colors. I had a really good time. 

Rose taught me a lot. Her ethos is very much flip the table, ask questions later. I really admire that. I think there are a lot of, especially women, in the world we’re living in today who really want to flip the table. And I say, go for it. 

Watch Our Full Love Hurts Interviews:

• Ke Huy Quan
• Ariana DeBose
• Jonathan Eusebio

Love Hurts blasts into theaters just in time for Valentine’s Day on February 7th.

NEXT: Ke Huy Quan Dishes On Zootopia 2: “The Story Is Incredible”

About Love Hurts

No matter how hard you try, you can’t break up with your past.

This Valentine’s Day, Oscar® winner Ke Huy Quan (Everything Everywhere All at Once, Loki) rockets into his first major leading man role as an unlikely hero, a seemingly mild-mannered realtor with a dark secret that he is desperate to leave behind. Spoiler alert: He won’t.

Quan stars as Marvin Gable, a realtor working the Milwaukee suburbs, where ‘For Sale’ signs bloom. Gable receives a crimson envelope from Rose (Oscar® winner Ariana DeBose; West Side Story, Argylle), a former partner-in-crime that he had left for dead. She’s not happy.

Now, Marvin is thrust back into a world of ruthless hitmen, filled with double-crosses and open houses turned into deadly warzones. With his brother Knuckles (Daniel Wu; Tomb Raider, Warcraft), a volatile crime lord, hunting him, Marvin must confront the choices that haunt him and the history he never truly buried.

Love Hurts comes to theaters on February 7th.

Presence composer Zack Ryan dicusses his collaboration with director Steven Soderbergh and how the main theme was always the Chloe character.

The composer behind the score for Steven Soderbergh’s Presence, Zack Ryan, brings a refreshing approach to the supernatural thriller genre. In a film where the camera represents the point of view of a ghost, Zack’s score steers away from typical genre conventions like jump-scare music and instead focuses on the emotional depth of the story—grief, loss, and familial dysfunction.

With a career spanning over three decades, Zack has scored more than thirty films. His versatility, drawing from classical, rock, and jazz influences, allows him to create rich, unique scores tailored to each project. Zack’s continued collaboration with Steven Soderbergh, which began with Full Circle, is a standout feature of his career, allowing him to explore a deep creative partnership with one of cinema’s most visionary directors.

Warning: Spoilers Ahead for Presence.

Zack Ryan On Creating The Emotional Score For Presence

Tessa Smith: What was your strategy going into scoring Presence? Because it is very unique for a thriller film.

Zack Ryan: We weren’t really trying to be the ghost with the score necessarily. Although the film does open with that solo piano piece that really gives you a sense of what the ghost is feeling, which to me, the intention was that it’s sort of lonely and it’s very peaceful. There was a little bit of a hopeful quality to it, but it was very serene. You get this tour of the home, but the rest of the score was really tracking the emotional stories, specifically for the Chloe character, but really for the family drama overall.

Steven and I weren’t trying to score particular characters so much. If we were going to pin down which character the score was tracking the most, it would be Chloe only because she’s the character who really felt the presence first and was dealing with loss and grief over her friend. There is another piece of music that occurs twice in the film. That one was really about trying to pin down the tone of following Chloe’s emotional experience with the grief and the melancholy that she’s dealing with while also balancing that piece of music so that it would play well within the greater context of a supernatural thriller. You can’t just write a sad piece of music for a teenager who lost a friend and just assume it’s going to work within the world that Steven has created visually, so that was a bit of a tonal balance, but of a dance that we had to do to get that tone right.

Tessa Smith: What is your collaborative process with Steven Soderbergh like? Because you have worked with him before.

Zack Ryan: He’s a composer’s dream. The first thing I worked on that he directed was a mini series called Full Circle for MAX a couple of years ago, and that was a totally different process than I’d ever experienced in my career because he’s so trusting and he gives you just enough information to inspire a million ideas without crushing your inspiration or giving you too many guidelines. 

The way we communicate, and it was the same on this, we communicate strictly through the work we were both doing. So on Full Circle, I was hired very early on. He’d been shooting for about a week and I think he had a ten or twelve week schedule. I was hired very early and read the scripts and he showed me a couple of scenes that he’d cut together with some temp music. So I got an idea of what he was going for and what kind of style he wanted the score to be.

I just started writing music for two months and sending him batches of stuff. Then he would drop that stuff in, send me back scenes, and we didn’t really speak all that much. I mean, there was some texting and general direction that was happening, but we were really communicating through the ideas that we were sending back and forth. 

Tessa Smith: You have worked on a lot of different genres. What is it about the thriller genre that interests you?

Zack Ryan:  I love changing genres because the idea of being able to go from Wizards Beyond Waverly Place to something else that’s on the opposite end of the spectrum. That’s ideal for me. I grew up playing and performing all different styles of music. I was a metal drummer. That was the first thing I was, when I was 14 years old, I was out in Hollywood playing at the Roxy. I don’t even know if it was legal that I was in those clubs, but I had a band and we played there.

Then I got involved in the school band program and I started learning classical percussion and I sang in the high school choir, played in jazz band. It was just a ton of different musical styles that I was constantly playing and absorbing. To be a film composer, you kind of have to have that versatility to be able to tackle whatever people throw at you. I’m so grateful that I’ve been able to do a lot of different styles over the last 20 years. 

Tessa Smith: Is there one piece in particular that was the most challenging to nail down?

Zack Ryan: This piece that I mentioned earlier, in support of the Chloe character’s arc and her emotional situation was the hardest tonally. The tone was a big issue with this movie to nail down something that, I’ll say one other thing about it, which is that, because of the way that Steven shot it, and this is not a spoiler, cause this is in every review of the movie that’s out there, but the entire movie is shot from the point of view of the ghost and there are no exceptions to that rule. 

So every scene is one shot and the scenes break with a cut to black and then you see the next, they’re almost like these little mini chapters. Because he shot the movie that way, just looking at it as an audience member, you are already feeling the atmosphere. You’re already feeling that you’re in a supernatural thriller film. It’s all there. The score didn’t have to provide any of that ambience or musical wallpaper that is constantly telling you that something is afoot in this house. We didn’t have to do that. He provided all of that. 

So that freed us up to tackle the emotional part of the story and more of the family tension and the dysfunction that’s happening within the family instead of providing the practical thing that scores usually do in a film. What we didn’t have to do is we’re not stinging or accenting on the screen actions really ever in this. If someone gives someone a look or grabs a dagger or whatever happens, we’re not hitting that with the music in this.

It was really an interesting exercise. Something I learned from Steven on this is that music doesn’t always have to track actions on the screen. And in the case of this film, there are several pieces of music in the movie that really bridge two of these chapters. They kind of take you out of one and give you a breather and let you process what you’ve just seen and then lead you into the next chapter. The music is not saying here’s what’s happening right now on screen, but the score can be saying, this is what this story feels like right now.

It’s kind of a broader general emotional statement that we would make from time to time.

Presence is playing in theaters now.

NEXT: Composer Hannes De Maeyer On Scoring The Couple Next Door

About Presence

A family moves into a suburban house and becomes convinced they’re not alone.

Presence is playing in theaters now.