In a recent chat with ComicBook, ‘The Thicket’ director Elliott Lester explained how James Hetfield joined the cast.
“I had a dream, I woke up, and I called Peter Dinklage. I said, ‘I’ve had a dream and we have to make this happen,’” Lester recalled. “He said, ‘What’s your dream?’ and I said, ‘We must have James Hetfield in this movie.’ He said, ‘I love that idea,’ I said, ‘Well, how are we going to find him?’”
He continued, “So I tried to get ahold of him through management, I couldn’t get hold of him, but we knew somebody who’d made this movie called ‘Anvil,’ it’s a documentary about heavy metal bands, and we ended up getting hold of James within a week, and we did the Zoom call with James Hetfield.”
“It was phenomenal, he was like, ‘You know, I’ve always wanted to do a dark western,’” Lester shared Hetfield’s reaction. “And I was like, oh wow. You can hear it in his voice; that voice is unmistakable. And then yeah, he signed on, he came in, and he was really wonderful to direct actually. He gave himself to the role, to the film.”
The first trailer for ‘The Thicket,’ a dark western thriller with Hetfield, arrived last month. Hetfield appears in more than one scene. He plays a sheriff. We don’t hear him speak, but he gets into a gunfight. The trailer shows him firing a gun and walking through snow.
‘The Thicket,’ based on Joe R. Lansdale’s novel, will be in theaters on Friday, September 6. This is Hetfield’s second time playing a cop. He was Officer Bob Hayward in the 2019 Ted Bundy movie ‘Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile.’