In early 2023, Hunter Doohan got a text out of the blue from Bryan Cranston.
Doohan, best known for his work in Netflix’s Wednesday, had played Cranston’s son on the Apple series Your Honor. Now Cranston wanted to know if he could share Doohan’s number with Cranston’s Breaking Bad co-star Aaron Paul. For Doohan, a die-hard Breaking Bad fan, the answer was an emphatic yes.
Doohan and Paul had never met, but the pair had a connection beyond Cranston: Doohan played a younger version of Paul’s character in Apple’s Truth Be Told.
Paul was producing a small indie called The Wilderness, and wanted to get in touch with Doohan about the lead role. The feature takes place in Utah at a wilderness retreat for teen boys who struggled with addiction. The program is led by an enigmatic program director, James (Sam Jaeger), who may have dark intentions. The feature is partially inspired by personal experiences of writer-director Spencer King, who asked Paul to arrange an introduction.
King and Doohan hit it off, with the actor boarding as a producer as well as star. A few months later, they were in the middle of the Utah wilderness for a shoot that had a summer camp vibe, with the cast and crew staying in cabins.
“Our first day of production got shut down by this insane monsoon that came through,” recalls Doohan of the shoot that included 20 days in Utah and an additional five in California.
Adds King of that first challenging night: “I expected the crew to walk at that moment. But they had fun. They were riding around on a dune buggy in the mud with singing songs.”
King (left) and Doohan on set of The Wilderness.
Courtesy Hunter Doohan
No matter how challenging filming was, what came next was harder for Doohan and King. After King worked on his cut, they learned that getting distribution or festival births would be a challenge.
“We shot it in Utah. We had this great cast, and it was such a cause-based film,” says King, who recalls thinking they would definitely get into Sundance, which for decades had been based in Utah. It wasn’t to be. “We didn’t get in anywhere,” King says.
Doohan too was discouraged, noting that one festival, which he declined to name, rejected the film without clicking the screener link to view the movie. “They didn’t even have one of their interns watch it, at least or even put it on and then go get coffee,” he says.
Eventually, the movie found its home two years after they completed production. It landed with Dark Star Pictures and enjoyed a small theatrical release, where it landed strong reviews before heading to PVOD.
“The theatrical release kind of felt like a festival run,” says King. “We did these Q&As in different cities. We were really blessed in that whole process. But the distribution landscape was really hard. And I’m not saying we were deserving of anything, but definitely we were surprised at how difficult it was.”
King has already shot his next feature, Nickels, which stars Rob Riggle, Odessa A’zion and Wilderness actor Aaron Holliday.
Doohan, meanwhile, continues his rise after breaking out on season one of Wednesday, in which he plays Tyler Galpin, a love interest to Jenna Ortega’s Wednesday Addams. Coming up, he has a lead role in the Sam Raimi-produced movie Evil Dead Burn, which opens July 24. King notes that taking Wilderness around the country clued him in to the power Wednesday and his leading man’s popularity: “It was just a line of people trying to take photos with [Hunter] afterwards.”
Thinking back to how his connections to Paul and Cranston led him to The Wilderness, Doohan says with a laugh: “It felt like I won some Breaking Bad sweepstakes.”
