The Interview (2014) on Netflix
Dave Skylark and producer Aaron Rapaport run Skylark Tonight. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is a fan, so they land an interview in Pyongyang. The CIA recruits them to assassinate Kim.
- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb6.5/10379,825 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes51%
Trailer
Plot summary
Aaron Rapaport produces Skylark Tonight, the show where Dave Skylark gets celebrities to talk about their personal lives. After the thousandth episode, another producer tells them their program is not real news, and Rapaport presses for a change. They find out that Kim Jong-un follows the show, and Rapaport sets up an interview with him in Pyongyang. Before they leave, CIA Agent Lacey asks the pair to kill Kim by handing him a poison strip during a handshake, to stop a possible nuclear strike on the West Coast. They agree. In Pyongyang, chief propagandist Sook-yin Park receives them and brings them to the palace, where Kim's security officers, Koh and Yu, treat them with suspicion.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Interview (2014)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Kim Jong Il was originally the assassination target in the script, but the project stalled when he died in 2011; Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg then rewrote it around his son Kim Jong Un because his closer age to the filmmakers felt funnier.
- After North Korea threatened action, a hacking group calling itself Guardians of Peace broke into Sony's computer systems and threatened terrorist attacks on theaters showing the film, causing major chains to refuse to screen it and pushing Sony to a digital-rental release instead.
- South Korean singer Yoon Mi-rae said her song 'Pay Day' was used in the film without her permission and took legal action against Sony, which was settled with her label, Feel Ghood Music, in May 2015.
- To fill out a crowd at the Pyongyang airport, the visual-effects team digitally reused a shot borrowed from an entirely different film, 22 Jump Street.
- After a security flaw let people download rather than stream the digital release, TorrentFreak estimated The Interview was pirated at least 1.5 million times through torrents in just its first two days online.
- North Korean defector groups Fighters for a Free North Korea and the Human Rights Foundation planned to float DVDs of the film into North Korea by balloon, but scrapped the plan after Pyongyang called it a de facto declaration of war.
- In April 2017, two Greek television programs mistakenly aired the film's opening scene, a girl reciting hate speech, as a real news event targeting the United States, forcing the hosts to apologize publicly afterward.
