Disney Studios Animation’s newest film, Strange World, is a pulpy throwback influenced by the works of authors H.G. Wells and Jules Verne featuring characters based on iconic blasts from the past such as Ka-Zar and Doc Savage. Co-director Don Hall (Big Hero 6) describes the film as an exploration of the universal father-son relationship told through 3 generations of the Clade family.
As always, Disney has assembled a fantastic voice cast for the project, including Jake Gyllenhall as Searcher Clade and Dennis Quaid as his father, Jaeger, a legendary, larger-than-life explorer whose life’s work took him away from his family. Strange World isn’t the first time Quaid and Gyllenhall portrayed a father-son duo on screen, having played Jack Hall and Sam Hall, respectively, in the 2004 disaster flick The Day After Tomorrow; however, as Quaid revealed in the global press conference for Strange World, the two stars had never previously met!
When asked about what parallels there were in the chemistry between him and Gyllenhall in the two film, Quaid laughed, saying “This is the first time Jake and I have been in the same room, actually.” The actor went on, seemingly jokingly, to say, “I’ve never seen any of those films, so I didn’t know what he looked like.” Gyllenhaal backed up Quaid’s comments, saying “I literally never met Dennis until this moment, which is really –yeah.” Quaid continued saying, “In Day After Tomorrow, we really didn’t have scenes together.” In an effort to answer the original question, Quaid did point out that the pair of actors have swapped one key part of their arc in the two films, saying to Gyllenhall, “The only difference is, is that I was searching for you and now you’re searching for me.”
Despite working “together” on two projects, it took a press junket to bring Gyllenhall and Quaid into the same room together for the first time. A glitch in the matrix if ever there were one. Strange World hits theaters November 23rd.
