5 min readIN THE SECOND half of the new Masters of the Universe film, after Prince Adam has transformed into He-Man and put his chiseled, shiny, greased-up muscles on display for all to see, there’s a scene where he really gets the chance to put all of that brute strength to the test. In his attempt to take back his home of Eternia and face the evil Skeletor (Jared Leto) and his many cronies, Adam shows up to the evil fortress at Snake Mountain ready to rock and roll, Brian May guitar solos in tow.
The result is a thrilling sequence, filmed with tons of action and absolutely dynamic camera movement from director Travis Knight and cinematographer Fabian Wagner. I’ve seen the movie two times now, and have referred to this scene as Adam’s “1 vs. 100,” because that seems like the amount of baddies he single-handedly takes down. “That was a fun, and also incredibly difficult, sequence to shoot,” Knight says.
For star Nicholas Galitzine, who plays Adam, it was not only the most important action scene in the movie, but also an important test in collaboration between himself, Wagner, stunt coordinator Liang Yang, and his stunt double, Johnny James. “This is the first time we see Adam allow a sense of rage and anger to overtake a sense of communication and perspective,” he tells me. “There’s a sense of hubris in this scene, and he really uses a vengeful spirit to dispatch these people.”
Logistically, Galitzine wanted to do as many of the stunts in the scene as he possibly could. And Yang was mostly on board. He only subbed out for a spattering of dirty work. “Johnny was like, ‘Look, I’ll do the unglamorous stuff,’” Galitzine explains. “I said, ‘Thank you, Johnny. That's very kind of you.’”
The extended scene marks a key part of Adam’s journey along the course of Masters of the Universe. After an action sequence that spans land and sky following the initial transformation, we get a few moments of Adam acting out of character, wanting to simply overpower all the bad guys rather than use his head and heart and rationale. It’s something his childhood friend Teela (Camila Mendes) clearly clocks on screen. But such a vital part of the story here is Adam learning the power of his strength—and learning that he doesn’t have to show all of it off at all times.
In the Snake Mountain 1 vs. 100 scene, we get to see what he can really do when he gets angry. Galitzine says that because Yang is 5'8" and comes from a background in the Chinese circus, he moves in a very different way than how Galitzine, at six feet and 200 pounds of pure muscle in top He-Man form, was moving. Galitzine pitched doing things a little differently in this moment. “I was saying to him, ‘Look, I think we need to adapt this character to move with the physicality that I have. Everything should feel brutal and violent and savage,’” he says. “And so we put together this sequence where there are still comedic beats within it, but it's just this constant flow of motion.”
A scene like that one would typically shoot over a period of three to four weeks. But because of budget limitations, Masters had to get it done in just three or four days. And that’s not even counting exhausting variables like the stunt being designed completely one way, only to arrive on set and have the revelation that the lighting doesn’t quite work. That means flipping everything backward, essentially redoing the stunts from scratch.
The scene also features Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson, known as The Mountain from Game of Thrones, as one of He-Man’s foes, Goat Man. Björnsson had to arrive at 2:00 and spend 10 hours in prosthetics becoming the red, horned baddie, before it came time to fight our hero with just about the biggest ax you’ll ever see.
That made things feel just a bit more dangerous for Galitzine. “He was so tired as he was swinging this ax at me. I think sometimes he was skipping a beat or adding a move in there,” he says. “I was genuinely trying not to get decapitated by the strongest man in the world.”
Björnsson stands at 6'9", and dudes right near that size were the norm on the Masters set. “I don’t think people have an appreciation for how big [Galitzine] got,” Knight says. “Part of it is because I stacked the cast with giant dudes. It was nothing but giant dudes—big, muscle-bound guys who were like 6'5". Everyone in the movie, all the dudes are huge. And so it’s a little bit like looking at a guy on an NBA team; You can’t tell that any of them are big, because they’re all big.”
You really feel that size in the Snake Mountain scene, where He-Man’s brute strength is able to take out all the bad guys, but it certainly doesn’t feel effortless. In fact, because we see him working so hard and still ultimately winning out, it makes the moment a greater testament to not only how strong he is, but his ultimate resolve and persistence as well. “It's the most fun I've had,” Galitzine says. “It was truly one of the great joys I've ever had putting a scene on film, because I just felt a huge amount of agency in how I was able to build his physicality.”
And, oh yeah, Galitzine adds: He learned to fight with katanas, which are light and limber swords. That’s quite different from the Sword of Power, which he says is a “heavy object,” meaning each swing comes with an added layer of power and intention.
For just a moment, Galitzine stops, because he realizes he’s been ranting in pure excitement as he thinks back to putting the sequence together. “I'm sorry, I'm chewing your ear off,” he says. “That scene for me was just the one I really, really, really wanted to get right, because it's him at his full power.”
Well, I tell him without skipping a beat, it was awesome. So good work.
He-Man himself is pleased: “As long as we elicit that reaction,” Galitzine says with a big smile on his face, “Then that was the most important thing.”
Buy Masters of the Universe Tickets Here
