Patrick Wilson Explains Opening Scene In Moonfall
Going into Moonfall, audiences expected to see all the chaos but not exactly in the form of Patrick Wilson’s performance of Toto’s “Africa.” The movie opens with Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson) doing an off-pitch version of the song as he is seen floating through space while being on a NASA mission, many years before the events of the movie take place. As we find out, this is sort of a testament to Patrick Wilson’s acting abilities because he is also quite a talented singer, having performed in titles as Phantom of the Opera. This comedic bit was also discussed in Wilson’s recent interview with ComicBook.com.
“That was always in there, because they got the rights through mutual friends, which I won’t bore you with, but that was always the tune,” Wilson explained, definitively ruling there was never another song to be used in the opening of Roland Emmerich’s latest disaster film. “The question was, and actually, not to bring up what you don’t see, but I remember, I would kinda sing it just a little under, just bad enough to have someone be annoyed, ’cause there’s nothing more frustrating than when you’re an actual singer and they go, ‘Hey, I need you to sing really badly.’ You’re like, ‘Ah, man, all right.’ But it’s fun, it’s fun to do that. Just sing flat, so it just sounds kinda terrible. But I did do the entire solo that rolling cut. I was like, ‘Oh, that was the most fun part.’ Did the whole thing, I just kept letting it roll, I’m like, ‘This will never be in the movie, but I’m just gonna keep going.'”
As fans, we need to have our fingers crossed for seeing Wilson’s off-pitch rendition of “Africa” on the Moonfall blu-ray. That being said, singing like he could not actually turn out to be only one of many challenging aspects of Wilson’s performance in the movie, Moonfall. A later sequence also saw Brian Harper getting absolutely pummeled by waves in a LA hotel lobby while Emmerich, despite acknowledging the fact that it is easier to pull off visual effects now than it was 25 years ago, made a decision to make sure of the watery chaos that was captured practically in-camera.
“That was crazy. I’m not gonna lie,” Wilson told ComicBook.com. “I’ve done a lot of stuff, wire work and all that stuff, I’m pretty comfortable in, as comfortable as you can be, but that, because it’s literally just, you go outside and you see this giant container of water and then they’re like, ‘Okay, basically, we’re just gonna tip that over. Now, we’ve padded the stairs and that thing that looks like rocks that’s actually rubber, but we’re not quite sure where it’s gonna take you, so good luck.’ They’re as careful as they can be, but you are just kind of, they said, ‘Listen, if you go out too far, you go this way, you go that way, just be careful. Make sure you’re facing what’s gonna happen.’ So yeah, we were in it, it was probably just one, or was it, I think it was just one day for that one shot. I think we probably did it like four times maybe, four or five times, the real sweeping you away.”
