[This story contains major spoilers for Send Help.]
Send Help star Dylan O’Brien is not going to say what you think he’s going to say about the victor of Sam Raimi’s deserted island duel.
In a previous conversation with THR, O’Brien stated that he doesn’t buy into the common philosophy among actors that one must function like a defense attorney for their antagonists. He certainly empathizes with his acclaimed villainous characters in River Gallo’s Ponyboi (2024) and Jan Komasa’s Anniversary (2025), but he doesn’t necessarily feel an obligation to justify their unforgivable behavior or paint them as victims. That mindset remains especially true when it comes to his smarmy CEO character, Bradley Preston, in Send Help. (Major spoilers ahead.)
Case in point, he sides with Rachel McAdams’ Linda Liddle, a strategy and planning exec for Bradley’s inherited consulting firm. O’Brien’s position is all the more surprising when you consider that McAdams’ Survivor enthusiast character ultimately kills Bradley, as well as his fiancée (Edyll Ismail’s Zuri) and a local skipper, who was merely helping the latter search for Bradley and any other survivors of his company’s plane crash in the Gulf of Thailand.
O’Brien specifically feels for the fact that Linda is a widowed survivor of an abusive, alcoholic husband. He also sympathizes for her after Bradley refuses to honor his late father’s promised promotion to his most valuable employee of the last seven years. Instead, he decides to exile her to a satellite office because her dowdy aesthetic doesn’t suit his boys’ club mentality. But before that can happen, Bradley is convinced to bring her on the fateful business trip to Bangkok in an effort to protect an imminent merger. That reluctant decision to include Linda saved Bradley from a more immediate death since he washed ashore on the same tropical island with a survivalist.
“Personally, I ride for Linda. I have been very surprised to hear how many people are like, ‘Well, Linda is a murderer.’ And I’m like, ‘But she was abused,’” O’Brien tells The Hollywood Reporter in support of Raimi’s most critically well-received film alongside 2004’s Spider-Man 2. “I love that it isn’t a black-and-white dynamic. We were conscious while making it that you may be siding with Bradley over Linda at some point in the film, but it’s very interesting to see that scale tip back and forth. It’s one of the most fun parts about the movie.”
Written by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, Send Help sets itself up a lot like Breaking Bad in that you have a highly sympathetic main character who’s been unable to reach their utmost potential, either through systemic barriers or their own self-sabotage. Both stories then become a test of how long our initial sympathies can last once roles reverse and immoral acts accumulate.
The dealbreaker for a number of viewers, including this writer, is Linda’s aforementioned double murder of Zuri and her local skipper/tour guide to prevent a return to the mainland. At first, Linda delayed her and Bradley’s rescue in order to prove her worth to her new boss and guarantee her promotion as soon as they’re back in the States. But her ongoing interference evolved into a version of Lima Syndrome, having developed feelings for her “new sweetie” she was holding captive. (She previously referred to her pet bird as Sweetie.)
There are still plenty of Linda defenders besides O’Brien. He says the majority of the Send Help crew are “Team Linda stans.” But he hopes that the audience’s response doesn’t become overly tribal because the film was never meant to be a gendered showdown. (Personally, I don’t align with either person.)
“I hope that there’s no team anyone, to be honest, and I also hope that there’s no gender factor in it,” O’Brien admits. “Sam and Rachel were very conscious about not wanting to be too heavy handed [regarding] women versus men in the workplace. It’s more universal than that. Anybody can relate to being on the short side of this dynamic in a human society. Again, it’s where I get sympathy for Linda.”
Below, during a spoiler conversation with THR, O’Brien also discusses how he approached one of his favorite scenes in which Bradley is drugged and temporarily paralyzed.
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Send Help’s Bradley Preston seems like he’s cut from the same cloth as Vincenzo from Ponyboi and Josh Taylor from Anniversary. Maybe this is just me trying to create an “era” of work, but do you consider these guys to be birds of a feather?
That’s so interesting. An antagonistic character in a movie like Send Help could have so easily stopped at that first dimension’s dynamic between Bradley and Linda and rode out the rest of the movie on it. But this movie doesn’t do that. It evolves. It really gets into the weeds of what got Bradley and Linda there, but I don’t necessarily think that makes things forgivable.
One of my favorite things about the film is how you’re constantly questioning the character dynamics. Is he a bad guy? Is she bad? Are they both bad? Should I be rooting for either of them? Am I rooting for both of them? Should I pick one? Should I pick neither? Hopefully, the audience also questions these things when weighing their own perspective on the characters.
I imagine that you can relate to Linda at the start of the movie. You previously told me how you were dismissed or belittled early in your career if you ever tried to speak up about something important to you. Thus, did you base Bradley on any of those people who disregarded your voice back in the day?
I wouldn’t say that specifically, but everybody can draw from an experience where they were a Linda and dealt with a Bradley. Bradley was still a fun role to the piece at hand, and I really understood the assignment in terms of this particular world. I really love funny antagonistic characters. I love a character who’s kind of an idiot, but also not dumb. I love how Bradley can be written off so easily, and while he does have [undesirable] qualities and a thoughtlessness in the way he moves through the world, he’s not unintelligent. He has to reach down into the bag to counter Linda once his back is against the wall. So it’s really fun and interesting to see how he does that and what he relies on — and vice versa with her character too. I just loved seeing their individual depths unfold and the ways in which they instinctually move to survive.
When you first met Sam Raimi, he wore a bag over his head for 20 minutes. Did he pull off any other memorable bits or gags throughout the process?
Yeah, he would occasionally do really funny stuff with the crew. He’d have bits that he’d write or do. He’d have a song and dance teed up, which he did on one of our first days of filming the office stuff. He’s a very funny person, a very cartoonish person and a very good comedic writer. I would ask him about it all because I really felt like I understood him, and he would say, “Oh really? It’s just deflection because I’m nervous.” He said that his bits come from the very human place of nervousness, and I found that so interesting because he doesn’t strike you as nervous at all when you’re working with him. So it’s more of an icebreaker for himself, and I’m not sure if he’s aware that it also serves as one for everyone else. It’s very comforting.
Let’s get into spoilers. Send Help puts the audience on Linda’s side at the jump, but as the movie goes along, it wants you to question your allegiance to her. After all, she consistently prevented her and Bradley’s rescue throughout the movie. Linda then killed Bradley’s fiancée and a local skipper because she wanted to keep him captive longer. Yes, he drugged her food, but he accurately sensed she was holding him captive. She nursed him at the start, but he also saved her life when she nearly fell off the cliff. In the end, do you think Bradley got an undeserved fate?
She could have just broken his nose at the end. (Laughs.) We don’t fully know what happened. That’s part of what’s fun about the movie. For me, personally, I ride for Linda. It’s not that I don’t also ride for Bradley, but it’s been really interesting to hear the various reactions that people have. I have been very surprised to hear how many people are like, “Well, Linda is a murderer.” And I’m like, “Well, yeah, but she was abused.”
There’s so many interesting pieces of these characters that provide a certain texture to their choices and make it quite debatable. It’s clearly already drawing sides, but I love that it isn’t so clear cut. I love that it isn’t a black-and-white dynamic. We were conscious while making it that you may be siding with Bradley over Linda at some point in the film, but it’s very interesting to see that scale tip back and forth. It’s one of the most fun parts about the movie.
Linda murdering Bradley’s fiancée and her local tour guide, I don’t know how she comes back from that. During the coda, she pretends that she was the only plane crash survivor so she clearly knows that telling the real story would implicate her. Technically speaking, that makes Bradley the victim.
But Linda has lived her life as somebody who nobody pays an ounce of attention or respect to whatsoever, so I get why she desperately doesn’t want to go back to that world. What are you willing to forgive? What are you going to hang your hat on? She goes to barbaric places, which is what’s really fun about the premise involving these characters. It’s about how much sympathy you have for her, and so I wouldn’t want to go back [to her previous life] either. She’d be rescued and taken back to the prison that they’d already set for her [in a satellite office]. They never paid mind for how they treated her in civilization, and she knows that will be her fate again.
I mentioned how Bradley drugged her to give himself an opening to raft his way out of captivity …
He took her cup! (Laughs.)
But I failed to mention that Linda saw Bradley’s drugging and raised him a drugging of her own, one in which she convinced him that she was castrating him. Your teary eyes really sold Bradley’s frozen state of terror.
It was a fun assignment. To be honest, I did not think about what the hell I was even going to be doing during that scene until we got there that day. It was such an involved scene for Rachel as well, so we started with her the whole first half of the day. I then got my feet under me and figured out what my place in the scene was going to be. It became a very fun ask; any actor would enjoy that. It’s a blast to be trapped within your own body and react to this psychological torture. You’re supposed to show utter paralysis and not be able to move any muscle in a very zany tonality. I love that scene. It’s one of my favorite scenes, but it’s not something that you can really prepare for.
I’m so curious how the responses by gender will ultimately shake out. I asked the female chaperone at my screening who she ultimately rooted for, and she said Linda without any hesitation. You’re more Team Linda than I expected, but I do think there’s going to be some Bradley sympathizers, largely because the fiancée and local captain were innocents.
Yeah, I just think they both have points. They’ve both made bad choices. It just depends more on how much you can forgive. I hope that there’s no team anyone, to be honest, and I also hope that there’s no gender factor in it. Sam and Rachel were very conscious about not wanting to be too heavy handed [regarding] women versus men in the workplace. It’s more universal than that. It’s a human thing. Anybody can relate to being on the short side of this dynamic in a human society. Again, it’s where I get sympathy for Linda.
When [Bradley’s fiancée and her tour guide] tell Linda to get onto the boat and leave her mangoes because she’s not going to need them anymore, you see her grasp onto her backpack that she weaved and the food that she gathered herself. You can see her remember how that [old] world didn’t treat her the way it treats others. She drew the short straw in that version of her existence. So it’s interesting to put her character in this new scenario and watch how far she’ll go to hang onto it.
I love watching flawed characters. I love that both of these characters can be the protagonist and easily be the antagonist. I love movies like that. They’re rarer and rarer nowadays.
How much debate was there on set?
The crew got into it a lot. The crew had a lot of teams and sides, but it was mostly all Team Linda stans. Rachel and I just tried to calibrate the piece. We were trying to earn each tip of the scale. No matter which way you turn with the characters, our focus was on you buying it and believing where they’re coming from. So, hopefully the changing of allegiances was achieved. At times, it was my job to be like, “Well, why would Bradley promote you?” He’s pretty thoughtless and harsh about it.
I don’t think there’s any reality where Bradley honors his father’s promise to promote Linda because we later found out about how much he resented his absent father. (Bradley’s father is portrayed photographically by Raimi’s creative soulmate, Bruce Campbell.)
I love the resentment of the father theory, and I’m sure that could be a layer for him as well. But I came at it from a place of, “I have my phobias about your existence, but it’s nothing personal. This is how this works. I can’t shepherd you into a room and think that people are going to be like, ‘Hell yeah.’” He subscribed to a men’s club dynamic where it’s nothing personal, but he could have been a lot more sensitive, let alone been someone who tries to counter that nature of the business world.
Prior to her being drugged, Linda says something about how Bradley must miss his fiancée, and his response wasn’t the most convincing. What did you make of that?
To be honest, in delivering that line, Bradley was more so observing whether Linda was ingesting the poison or not. The line was either an auto response, or he didn’t even hear the question because he’s thinking, “Is she taking the poison?” But I did always feel like there’s a sense of remorse in his delivery, as in maybe he hasn’t always been the best partner to this person.
With you being a die-hard baseball fan, it must have been a thrill to work with Pedro Cerrano (Dennis Haysbert) from Major League in that early office sequence.
Yeah, good catch. One of the first things I said to him was, “Dude, I love you in Major League.” And he was like, “Oh, thanks, man. I really love the Maze Runner movies.” And I was like, “What!? You saw the Maze Runner movies?” And he was like, “Oh, I see everything.” So I geeked out about that. He rocks.
Your Indie Spirit nomination for Twinless is cool, but I’m sure you’d agree that Twinless being number one on my 2025 top ten list is equally cool.
(Laughs.) Twinless being number one on anyone’s list, I’ll take it. Trust me. I appreciate that so much, man.
I have a very specific question. Dennis (James Sweeney) told Rocky at the start that he’d never broken a bone before, and Rocky responded that he’d now jinxed himself. Dennis then showed up to the final scene with his arm in a sling. Do you think he actually jinxed himself and genuinely broke a bone? Or was he just going for a manipulative sympathy play to get his friendship with Roman back?
I definitely never viewed it as a sympathy play. The way that James, as a filmmaker, tells stories, if a seed is planted, then there is going to be a payoff at some point. I also feel like James believes in humans. So I think we would both agree that the sling wasn’t a manipulative tactic there at the end. That was Dennis in his rawest form.
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Send Help is now playing in movie theaters.
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