Robert Sheehan on new film Jet Trash

Feature by Rachel Bowles | 05 Dec 2016

Misfits and Mortal Instruments actor Robert Sheehan talks to The Skinny about starring and producing suspenseful indie thriller Jet Trash

It would be a shame to reduce Jet Trash into any of the genre boxes it ticks, but here goes. It's a sun-drenched Christmas film, opening on an idyllic, postcard perfect Goa, with Robert Sheehan's Lee submerged in crystalline waters, coming up for air to the golden tones of Bing Crosby crooning Mele Kalikimaka (Hawaiian Christmas Song), his warm baritone reminding us of Golden-age Hollywood escapism. Jet Trash, however, is closer to a Hitchcockian nightmare.

You could also call it a film noir with a neon palette, complete with Vix, a boldly feminist iteration of a femme fatale, played by Sofia Boutella (Director Charlie Belleville insisted on having a female director of photography and production designer to add a female perspective to the male gaze). There are shades of those multi-stranded cockney crime comedies from the 90s, but without the ‘lads’ culture or veneration and romanticising of gangsters. Jet Trash also functions as a critique of Lee's (and Hollywood's) dream of India as an Orientalist fantasy playground, an escape for disenfranchised Western youths.

It's a veritable, psychedelic onion of a film, and the Misfits actor has done well starring in and shaping Jet Trash, working as a producer for the first time in his short career. 

Far from Goa's pristine beaches on a dark and humid summer's day in Scotland, The Skinny meets Sheehan in, appropriately enough, an Indian restaurant just down the road from where Jet Trash will receive its world premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in a few hours time. While others in the cast and crew nervously await the result of years of hard work, Sheehan remains quietly confident: "We showed it to loads of people, and [those] between the ages of 15-24 really loved the film," he tells us. "So that's given us a great spur on." 

He is aware, however, that there are no guarantees in the movie game. "You just never know," he says. "I've thought things I've done [in the past] are really good, or I've been assured by the director three months after we've finished and he's edited it and he's said, 'It's great! All the way through. There's not one bad moment.' Then you watch it and gasp." As a producer, he has no such surprises coming with Jet Trash? "I mean, I've seen this movie loads of times in various incarnations. I know this is the best version of our film."

So, how does Sheehan think the film will be received later that night? "I have no fucking idea," he admits.

Fortunately for Sheehan and first time director Charles Henri Belleville, Jet Trash garnered critical acclaim after its screening and has won a December roll out in cinemas across the UK. Watching Jet Trash with its heightened, dreamlike aesthetics, its solid, subtle performances and engaging, suspenseful narrative – as funny as it is heart stopping – it's hard to believe that the film was shot in a matter of weeks on a shoestring budget. "The money definitely stretched," the actor agrees.    

Sheehan himself was stretched too, almost to breaking point, having suffered multiple injuries during filming. First, he crashed a moped, almost breaking his leg and potentially jeopardising the entire project. "I shed blood for this film," he laughs. "We actually got the crash on camera. There are flashes of it [during the film.]" In the scene, Sheehan's character is supposed to accidentally kill a cow, played by real life cow Jeff (nicknamed by Sheehan after Goldblum for his stage presence), who had to take a dose or two of ketamine for the scene. "Poor old Jeff. He had an awful going over, or the best day of his life! You couldn't tell."

Sheehan's second dicey incident involved snarling gangster Marlowe (played by Craig Parkinson) choking him out. "Oh, memories! I'm so glad to have met these fuckers," he laughs. "Yeah, that was entirely my own doing as well. We were in this really stuffy, wet, humid indoor swimming pool room with jacuzzi and it's an actual nightclub. I was sort of gagging, play-acting way too much, and somewhere in the middle of the take I just completely lost consciousness.

"I hit the floor, knees up, feet up like a fucking dead chicken. I just went. Then I remember in my head feeling this excruciating frustration of 'God, your head's going to explode. I can't move! I can't move!' It was really horrible because I was kind of conscious and unconscious. It was like sleep paralysis. Then people started to murmur and I leapt to my feet and said, 'I don't feel well, I don't feel well.' Someone said 'Oh God, get him a cup of tea and a biscuit!' All for the art!"

We ask Sheehan the standard 'how'd you get involved in the project?' question. As is often the case with this 28-year-old actor, we don't get the standard response. "They brought me Simon Lewis's novel Go [upon which Jet Trash is based] and they said, 'Read that,' and I said, 'I can't read.' So they said, 'We'll have a matronly woman read it to you.' So I lay there and was fed grapes by two Turkish boys while this large lady read me the book. Once I'd indirectly read it, I also read a treatment, which is a very rough approximation, like 20-25 pages. And that's how you whet people's appetite, you know? It was very nice to be at the grass roots level, and be cradled by a large woman with a large bust because everyone needs a bosom for a pillow."

Sheehan's unique brand of humour comes across in his characterisation of Lee, a comic yet tragic figure trying to outrun his demons and always fucking things up. "We have in common his fabulous dress sense," he says when we ask what other traits he shares with the character. "It's hard because, in my head, the character came from a place of, 'What would it be like to play a person who is completely and implicitly self-centred? Whose life exists for nothing else but themselves and all of the charm they have...'

"That's the thing about charm sometimes – charm can be sapping, vampiric. The fun guy at the party is usually fun for selfish reasons and everyone around him is window dressing. I think it's an egotistical thing sometimes to be the confident, charming, louty sort of fella, because really all you're doing is holding up a mirror in front of yourself."

This is how Sheehan's character comes across at the beginning of Jet Trash. "Like all good characters, he goes through a change and comes to a realisation about himself," explains Sheehan. "He realises that he's self-centred, that he fucks things up. And he comes to that realisation just by adding himself to any equation he makes that thing have less value. [I have] a friend who is an alcoholic but hasn't drank in about 32 years, lovely man, great guy, he got sober in his 30s. That's what he said he believed: if you added him to any situation – a home, a family, a party – he would just lessen that thing's value by his very presence. Now that's an awful way to live."

It's this raw honesty at the heart of Jet Trash, its all too human characters, that flesh out Belleville's vivid, tense debut and elevate it to must-see cinema.


Jet Trash is released 6 Dec by SUMS Film and Media