Orion is a new sci-fi film starring Drew Van Acker (Pretty Little Liars), Andrew McCarthy (Pretty in Pink, Weekend at Bernie’s) and Debby Ryan (Disney’s The Suite Life on Deck). It follows Acker as Apollo, a lone astronaut survivor on a space mission. The interrogator is played by McCarthy, a NASA interrogator trying to figure out what happened.

The film is very intimate as the majority of the film focuses on Acker and McCarthy acting opposite each other.

“That is what you get excited about when you do this,” Acker tells Nerd Reactor about the film. “If you’re just working with yourself, it’s like, ‘Okay, there are limits to that.’ But with other people, you don’t know what they’re going to bring. You don’t know what they’re going to do. You don’t know what their process is, and all these things. Someone like [McCarthy] who’s had such a career and a long, long, long resume, you just know you’re going to get those little nuggets of gold.

“For me, I felt like my only job was to just be as prepared as possible, but just wait for those nuggets and soak them in and react off them. So the play, the actors, we talk about it a lot. The play and the imagination of it all. So I think ultimately that’s all you can hope for is that there’s room to play, but also grow, right? You have to evolve as a character and as an actor through the story. So Andrew created such a great space for that. So it was a dream for me.”

With Apollo the astronaut having amnesia, the mystery gets unraveled as the scenes continue.

“I think Apollo is going through a bit of an identity crisis, but he doesn’t know it,” the actor explained. “There’s an onion and layers are being peeled. Quickly and slowly at the same time, there’s so much that he’s saying that he isn’t saying. And I think what I really like about it is that you see that unfold. Not all the time do we get to see somebody be so tied to a certain identity and then be forced to look in the mirror and be forced to say, ‘Maybe I’m not as righteous and maybe I’m not this person that I’ve perceived myself to be or how others have perceived me for so long.’ So I love the idea that he gets to confront that or has to confront that.”

About Orion

Synopsis: Orion is an intense, sci-fi thriller about a Nasa Interrogator (Jim) tasked to help an amnesiac astronaut (Apollo) recover his memory in order to determine “who” or “what” killed the rest of the crew before they crash landed back on Earth.

The film is directed by Jaco Bouwer and written by Anne Vithayathil. It stars Andrew McCarthy, Drew Van Acker and Debby Ryan.