What Bone Temple reveals about Jimmy Crystal
When 28 Years Later hit theaters last summer, audiences were awed not only by Danny Boyle's blistering new vision of zombie horror, but also by the curious introduction of Jimmy Crystal.
Played by Sinners' Jack O'Connell, Jimmy instantly captivated audiences, who were ravenous to see more of him in the 28 Years Later direct sequel The Bone Temple. But can you handle what director Nia DaCosta has in store as she takes the reins for the second film in this emerging trilogy?
Entertainment Editor Kristy Puchko welcomed O'Connell and DaCosta to our Say More couch to dig into all things Bone Temple. When it came to Jimmy Crystal, the pair shared how they made sense of the madman whose biggest influences are The Teletubbies, Jimmy Savile, and his horrific childhood trauma.
Bone Temple's Jimmy was shaped by tragedy and TV.
Jimmy bookends 28 Years Later, beginning as a boy fleeing his family's home — which is under attack by the infected — seeking sanctuary in the nearby church where his father is a vicar. But before you can say "Amen," Jimmy's father gives himself over the infected horde while preaching it’s what God wanted.
This harrowing intro leaves Jimmy alone and terrified, cradled around the cross necklace his father has just given him. Then Alex Garland's screenplay winds into the coming-of-age story of a young boy named Spike (Alfie Williams), who is on his own 28 years after we see Jimmy in the opener. The two cross paths in the film's bonkers finale, where Spike is being chased by the infected only to be rescued by Jimmy and his fighting "Fingers," a youth gang of seven who all dress like their "lord."
At the time of 28 Years Later's release, Mashable covered how the costumes and sound effects of this zombie-slaying sequence mirrored the Teletubbies show that played on the TV as young Jimmy's sisters were slain. We also noted how Jimmy's blond Lancelot haircut and favoring of tracksuits with gaudy gold chains echoed the look of British TV personality Jimmy Savile, who would later be outed as a serial child predator.
Where audience members might have seen these Savile signatures as a warning that Jimmy might not be trustworthy, we speculated that Jimmy wouldn't know that's the signal he's dropping, because he wouldn't have known the horrible truth about Savile.
DaCosta confirmed our suspicions. "He perverts a lot of things," she said of Jimmy, but noted that in the world of 28 Years Later and Bone Temple, "Culture ended in 2001." Notably, Savile wasn't publicly exposed as a sexual predator until after his death in 2011. So, to Jimmy, Savile was worth admiring, just as he admires the Teletubbies. And his fixation on these elements of 2001 culture extend to his Fingers, like Jimmima (Emma Laird), who dutifully performs the "Dipsy dance" from Teletubbies while wearing jelly sandals and carrying a long-dead Tamagotchi.
O'Connell said he could relate to Jimmy on this level, saying, "I was finding myself quite enthusiastic, because I was nostalgic about that period anyway."
Beyond that, O'Connell spoke of how Jimmy has "deep-seated trauma based on seeing his family get mauled to death in front of his very eyes." Yet O'Connell was pleased that Garland's script and DaCosta's vision didn't let Jimmy off the hook for the violence he enacts because of his trauma. Instead, it gave him a foil in Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes). "What I love — also — about the film is we see Jimmy's unfettered depravity," he said, "with Dr. Kelson, with his advancements in medicine and the inquisitive mind, wanting to know what it was about the infected — and if it is curable. You have these two plots unfolding simultaneously and then they meet… You've got ultimate darkness meeting hope."
Nia DaCosta digs into the twisted faith of Jimmy Crystal.
Some of the most ghoulish moments in Bone Temple are not when the infected attack, but when Jimmy and his Fingers do. Invading a farmhouse, they take four people captive, and then give them "charity" — a term Jimmy has twisted to mean torture, like flaying the skin from their torsos. When he's not giggling over violence or recounting Teletubbies episodes to his amused apostles, he's twisting his own story into one where he is Satan's son, Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal, born to raise hell.
"Jimmy corrupts everything," DaCosta said, "Even with, like, the Teletubbies, he calls them the 'Teletummies.' It's also about how he remembers a thing. His entire dogma is built around this misremembered death of his father. You know, like, 'Oh yeah, my dad is Satan, because he thinks that's what he saw [when his dad was mobbed by the infected in the church]."
Speaking to when Jimmy preaches, the director said, "Those scenes in particular were so fun, because for me, that's when, when reading the script, I thought, 'OK, I know this character now.'"
Nia DaCosta reveals what Jimmy and Samson have in common.
When shooting scenes involving Jimmy's dark dogma and its violent rituals, DaCosta had a clear vision of how it would look. "It was really important to me to hold on to like, we're gonna sit on these actors and watch them," she explained, "Because this is when we as an audience get to see the person that he is, not just the monster. Because every monster has a person in there, which is also sort of like the infected."
She added that Jimmy had a commonality with the infected Alpha, Samson, saying, "It's like they're infected — they're not actually monsters. They're sick. So, that was just super important to me."
Tying this back to Jimmy and Kelson, the Satanist tyrant and the "atheist doctor," DaCosta said, "It is really beautiful to watch Kelson tease out — sort of like in a psych eval — 'So you talk to your dad in your head?' But also you realize, like, Jimmy actually did think he might see his dad [at the Bone Temple], and he's lonely, you know? You kind of feel that in the scene," she concluded, turning to O'Connell to add, "I thought you played that beautifully."
How's that.