Aaron Eckhart Reveals Psychological Challenges of Filming Intense Torture Scenes

The Thank You For Smoking star says “the whole day sucks” when you have to make those scenes.

In Chief of Station, his most recent film, The Dark Knight and Thank You For Smoking star Aaron Eckhart says he had some pretty rough days. There are scenes in which his character is being really broken down, physically and emotionally tortured, and while obviously that wasn’t really happening to Eckhart, that’s still a pretty difficult day of filming. Speaking with ComicBook about Chief of Station, Eckhart said that he had to go to “very, very dark place” to make the scenes work, and shared some of his thoughts on the process with us.

In the film, “Ben is a former CIA station chief whose world comes crashing down after his wife, a former operative, dies in a terrible accident. Soon, a cryptic message sends him back into the shadowy underworld of Eastern Europe, teaming up with a former adversary to unravel a conspiracy that challenges everything he thought he knew about his wife and the agency that he worked for.”

Eckhart took the part pretty seriously, and had a pretty rough few days while trying to make the part feel honest.

“Well, it was written differently,” Eckhart told ComicBook. “And Alex comes in, he goes, ‘Aaron, remember that scene in blah blah movie?’ And that guy like that? I go, yeah. And he goes, let’s do it like that, and blah, blah. So you talked to Jesse about it, and so it went deeper than had was originally written, and that all happened on basically the day. I had to go to a place where I didn’t personally want to go because it sucks. The whole day sucks, especially when you’re talking about being tortured and being physically and psychologically beaten and tortured. And so it was on a day like that, and you just have to, I didn’t talk to anybody. You just have to go to a place, very, very dark place, and you have to stay there. And I don’t think the entire day got out of my chair, maybe to go to the bathroom or something once or whatever, but I stayed there and took it. So it went to a place where we didn’t imagine it at first, and we have Alex [Pettyfer] to thank for that.”

Chief of Station is now avaialble on digital platforms like Fandango At Home, Prime Video, and Apple TV+.