This week marks the release of David Ayer’s new action flick The Beekeeper, centered on a group of international, society-stabilizing secret agents who are also, y’know, actual beekeepers. (Unsurprisingly, an idea from Kurt Wimmer, the screenwriter who once pioneered the idea of gun kata, a.k.a. “What if you were so good at shooting people that you intuitively understood how to never be shot.”) Which is all well and good, and in fitting with the film’s overall critical reception, which suggests that while The Beekeeper might not be “good” by any reasonable metric, it might be a particularly dopey kind of fun.
Except now, Jason Statham can actually keep bees. This is what happens when we mess around with silly movie concepts, folks: Jason Statham ends up with the actual ability to command the loyalty of several of the planet’s sharpest, most venom-assed insects.
This is per a recent interview that Ayer (at least temporarily freed from the dark passenger urging him to bring up his 2016 Suicide Squad movie, and its hypothetical “Ayer Cut,” every single time a reporter talks to him) gave to Entertainment Weekly this week. Ayer notes that although he got stung a ton of times while filming the movie’s various beekeeping scenes (at least in part because he was constantly shoving his camera into their tiny insectile faces), Statham was never stung even once.
“In the opening,” Ayer explained, “Jason’s pulling out the comb, and smoking the hive, and doing all the processes. That’s real. The bees are real. He learned how to do all of that. It’s interesting, because we see him as this rough punch-up guy, and yet he got the zen of it — he really embraced the zen of beekeeping.” Ayer also reported that he got stung a lot because he wore black socks on set, and bees apparently hate the color black, because “they think that it’s a bear.” So, there you go: The Beekeeper actually taught you something about bees! Two things, if you count “Do not fuck with action star and bee master Jason Statham.”
