Not the bees! It would’ve been the easiest (and probably safest) thing in the world to simply replace Statham’s winged friends with a bunch of digital ones and zeroes, particularly in an extended initial scene that put main character Adam Clay in the thick of the action as he went about his solitary life caring for a hive of bees. But in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Ayer revealed that Statham did all this for real — not just learning the ins and outs of being (bee-ing?) a beekeeper, but actually interacting with genuine bees. As he explained:
“In the opening, Jason’s pulling out the comb, and smoking the hive, and doing all the processes. That’s real. The bees are real. He learned how to do all of that. It’s interesting, because we see him as this rough punch-up guy, and yet he got the zen of it — he really embraced the zen of beekeeping.”
It’s good to know that in case this whole acting thing ultimately doesn’t work out, Statham has a pretty solid backup plan should he ever want to go that route. (Minus, I assume, all the killing and such.) The same can’t exactly be said for Ayer, who suffered a bit more painfully than his leading man ever did. Hilariously, the filmmaker learned a very important lesson during filming. “Jason did not get stung. I got stung a bunch of times because I was operating camera, getting all these tight shots of bees, the hero bee-shots, and I was wearing black socks. I learned that bees will attack black cloth because they think that it’s a bear.”
And now you know why beekeepers wear all-white. Who said movies couldn’t be educational?
“The Beekeeper” is currently buzzing in theaters.