Zazie Beetz endured 12-hour days in freezing water for ‘They Will Kill You’

Zazie Beetz has taken on a lot of standout roles, but her latest movie sounds like it asked for something extra. In “They Will Kill You“, she is not on the sidelines of the mayhem. She is right in the center of it.

When she talked to PEOPLE about filming, her biggest challenge was not what you would expect from an action horror project. It was not the gore, the weapons, or the nonstop adrenaline. It was something way more basic, and honestly, more brutal.

A first lead role that throws her right into the deep end

In “They Will Kill You“, Beetz plays Asia Reaves, a woman fighting for her life inside Virgil, a cult-run hotel in New York City. The film blends horror, action, and dark humor, and it asks a lot from its lead.

It also marks Beetz’s first lead movie role, which makes the behind-the-scenes reality even more intense. From the outside, you might assume the hardest days would involve the gore, the weapons, or the sheer intensity of the story. Beetz makes it clear that those were not the moments that pushed her the most.

The hardest part is the rain scenes

Beetz told PEOPLE that the most difficult work came from filming in fake rain during winter in Cape Town, South Africa. “I would actually say the most difficult stuff was the rain scenes, which I wasn’t expecting,” Beetz says.

And it was not a quick one-day setup. She describes rain sequences that pop up throughout the film, but feel endless when you are living inside them.

“Those are bits and bobs throughout the movie, but when you’re doing it, it feels like it’s the entire shoot,” she says, adding that “they have to use cold water because there are rain machines and because warm water steams in the camera.”

That detail says so much. It is not just “movie rain.” It is cold water dumped on you over and over because the camera needs it that way. The practical needs of filming come first, even when your body is begging for a break.

Long nights, freezing water, and no real way to warm up

The schedule alone sounds brutal. Beetz says the rain scenes took days, and the shoots ran through the coldest hours of the night. Nailing those sequences took “days on end because those scenes, the sequences, take like a week or whatever, and you’re outside from like 6:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. in cold water.”

If you are imagining a cozy tent, a giant heater, and instant comfort between takes, she shuts that down fast. The cold does not care about budgets or movie magic.

“You’re cold. There’s nothing. It doesn’t matter how many heat, it doesn’t matter how many millions of dollars a movie is, whatever. You just cold,” Beetz says. “There is something so primarily just like, ‘I’m f—ing cold.’ ”

It is one of those lines that feels funny because it is so honest. There is nothing glamorous about it. Just endurance.

Tapping into something primal to get through it

Beetz says the rain scenes forced her to dig deep and reconnect with why she wanted to be there in the first place. Because this was her first lead film role, that inner push mattered.

There is a clarity that can show up when you are uncomfortable and exhausted. Beetz describes it like being stripped down to your most basic self, where you stop trying to “perform toughness” and you just exist inside the challenge. “In some ways, when you’re stripped raw, you can just be like, ‘All right, I’m just in my primal self.’”

That is a really grounded way to explain what actors sometimes call “going to the well.” It is not mystical. It is deciding to keep going, even when you are miserable.

A set with big energy and constant motion

Patricia Arquette, who stars alongside Beetz, backs up the idea that this was an intense but exciting production. Arquette plays Lily Woodhouse, a Virgil employee, and she describes the film as a mix of genres that created its own momentum on set.

“It was a fun set to be a part of and a fun project, and it does have all these highs,” Arquette says. Then she lays out what that mix actually looks like. “It’s martial arts, it’s comedy, it’s gore, it’s horror, it’s all of that kind of stuff. And I think that has its own energy that was very exciting to be on the set.”

Arquette also notes that time was tight, and director Kirill Sokolov kept things moving and shifting. Decisions changed quickly, and the team had to stay flexible.

“And also,” she adds, “we didn’t have that much time. So Kirill’s moving the camera around and all of a sudden they’re making this different choice and all of a sudden, ‘Wait, no, this isn’t working, so we’ve got to do this!’ So it was just a very fluid experience all the time.” Beetz agrees, calling it an “experience of leaning into whatever the extremes are.”

Fun fact: Patricia Arquette describes it as martial arts, comedy, gore, and horror all in one. She also says the set was “fluid” because they were moving fast and adjusting constantly.

The real workload is a constant marathon of takes

Even if the finished movie feels fast, what we see on screen is built from repetition. Arquette describes Beetz’s schedule as relentless.

She calls it “a constant marathon.” And she gives a very specific example of what that means. “Like, you watch this movie, it’s breakneck speed nonstop from beginning to end, but she had to do multiple takes of each of those shots. So it’s like 16 takes of running down the hall and then, from another angle, 16 more takes of running down the hall,” Arquette says. “So it just was an incredible amount of stamina, an incredible amount of commitment.”

That is the part a lot of people forget. The final result looks like one long sprint. The actor experiences it as dozens of sprints, stacked on top of each other, often after midnight, and sometimes while soaked and freezing.

How Beetz recovered after set days

So what does recovery look like after all that? For Beetz, it was quiet, sleep, and space. “I need my quiet time. I nap a lot, as Arquette can attest to. At the end of the day, I needed to decompress alone at home and lean into the silent time.”

She also explains the mindset that helps when you are deep in a shoot. You just need to remember it ends. “You know there’s an end date and then you can more organically engage afterwards, when the psychosis of being on set is over,” she says.

Getting through it by picturing this exact moment

When the days were hardest, Beetz says she thought ahead to the time when it would all be behind her, and she would get to talk about it with pride. “I just kept thinking to this moment, that one day I’m gonna be sitting next to Patricia and we’re gonna talk about it and be all happy and be like, ‘I did that.’ ”

And then she lands the thought with a simple kind of joy. “And here we are,” Beetz says. “So I manifested to this exact moment right here.”

When you can see it for yourself

“They Will Kill You” features a stacked cast alongside Zazie Beetz and Patricia Arquette. It also includes Myha’La, Paterson Joseph, Tom Felton, and Heather Graham. There are a lot of familiar faces in the mix.

If you want to see how all that action, horror, and chaos come together, They Will Kill You is now in theaters. The film opened on March 27.

TL;DR

• Zazie Beetz stars as Asia Reaves in “They Will Kill You“, her first lead movie role.
• The film is an action horror story set in a cult-run hotel in New York City.
• Beetz says the toughest part of filming was not gore or weapons, but the fake rain scenes.
• The rain was especially rough because it was winter in Cape Town, and the water had to be cold for filming.
• Some rain sequences meant long overnight shoots, often from 6:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m., for days at a time.
• Beetz says the cold was unavoidable and became a primal endurance test.
• Patricia Arquette describes the set as high energy, mixing martial arts, comedy, gore, and horror.
• Arquette also says the shoot moved fast and stayed fluid due to limited time and shifting choices.
• Beetz’s workload involved many repeated takes, including running sequences from different angles.
• To recover, Beetz relied on naps, quiet time, and decompressing alone after long days.
• Beetz says she pushed through by picturing the future moment of talking about it with Arquette and feeling proud.
• They Will Kill You opened in theaters on March 27 and also stars Myha’La, Paterson Joseph, Tom Felton, and Heather Graham.
  

If you liked this, don’t forget to follow us for more exclusive content.

This article was made with AI assistance and human editing.

If you liked this, you might also like:

• The Terminator and Tom Cruise are behind 2026’s most talked about sci fi movie
• Timeless comedy shows that are always loved by fans
• Untold Secrets Behind Deadpool and Wolverine