"He Forgot Half His Dialogue": Dolph Lundgren Recalls Working With Willem Dafoe On Aquaman And How James Wan Filmed All The Underwater Scenes

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This article covers a developing story. Continue to check back with us as we will be adding more information as it becomes available.Action movie star Dolph Lundgren explains how James Wan"s Aquaman casting process worked and how grueling the DCEU movie"s underwater filming was. Dolph Lundgren played Mera"s father, King Nereus, in Aquaman and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. King Nereus supported Orm"s plan to launch a preemptive attack on the surface world in order to protect Atlantis before changing sides and supporting Arthur Curry"s pacifistic philosophy.
Speaking to Screen Rant at FAN EXPO San Francisco 2024, which Screen Rant is the media partner for, DCEU star Dolph Lundgren reveals how he was cast as King Nereus for Aquaman. Lundgren recalls auditioning with "a scene from Excalibur" with an over-the-top performance, which earned him the role. According to Lundgren, Aquaman"s underwater scenes required dozens of takes for a single shot, to the point that Vulko actor Willem Dafoe "forgot half his dialogue" after around the fortieth take. This strict filming process wasn"t only due to James Wan"s perfectionism, but mostly because the visual effects required it. Read Lundgren"s full comments below:

Dolph Lundgren: Yeah, that was a big break for me. It was my second audition. This was 2017, I think. There was this big movie, Warner Brothers, Aquaman, and they wanted me for a role. Well, James Wan wanted me, but the studio wanted me to do a screen test. They hadn"t given the script to anybody, so they gave me a scene from Excalibur, which was a movie from the ‘80s about Knights in England.
I had the scene where were King Arthur is very full of himself. He pulls up the sword, he fights his Knight, and he breaks Excalibur. He has this monologue where King Arthur breaks down, and at the end I say, “I’m nothing!” He’s crying or something at the end. So, I worked on it and I decided to go way over. I did two takes, and I did one way over where I was screaming, crying, whatever. And the next day they called, and I got the part.
Then I show up in Australia, and there"s all scenes where you"re floating; hanging on wires and pretending to be floating because all the underwater scenes are shot in the studio. The only water I saw was the Evian water in the barn that we were drinking for three months. For the first scene, I just had to float off my sea dragon or wherever I"m sitting on and just float over to over here 10 feet. I remember doing 10 takes, 20 takes – I needed 28 takes. I didn"t have one line of dialogue, and I"m like, “G--damnit, am I losing it? Am I this bad?”
And then I remember the next scene was with Willem Defoe, and we did like 40 takes. He forgot half his dialogue, I had to have cotton in my ears just to be able to listen because after a while you’ve tried everything. It turned out James Wan wanted different performances, but it was also because of the visual effects; if it wasn"t just perfect, we had to reshoot. It was very tedious, but also exciting for me to be in a big movie like that.

This article covers a developing story. Continue to check back with us as we will be adding more information as it becomes available.

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Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom

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