‘A House of Dynamite’s Stars Explain How Netflix’s Nuclear Thriller Transcends Politics

Kathryn Bigelow is officially back with her latest nail-biting movie, and the Academy is watching. As the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director for her 2009 film The Hurt Locker, Bigelow has a reputation for producing charged, tense thrillers that captivate both general and critical audiences, and her latest, A House of Dynamite, is expected to be no different.

As her first directorial project in almost a decade, Bigelow fans are eager to experience a film that star Jared Harris promises will produce a “communal building of tension within the room,” when a missile is launched at the United States. Alongside Harris in this star-studded cast are the likes of Rebecca Ferguson, Idris Elba, Anthony Ramos, andJason Clarke,with former senior producer of NBC’s Today Show, Noah Oppenheim, behind the script.

Ahead of the movie’s theatrical release on October 10 and its global Netflix release on October 24, Collider’s Steve Weintraub had the chance to chat with Harris and Letts about all things A House of Dynamite. The pair chat about the benefits of seeing the film in a theater, Bigelow’s shooting style, and the intricacies of their characters, in an interview available to watch in the video above and to read in the full transcript below.

You Need To See ‘A House of Dynamite’ in the Theater

“It only amplifies the experience if you see it when the other people.”

COLLIDER: Jared, I have to start with an individual question for you. You know how much I love Foundation, and the last time we spoke, I had not seen the finale. Now that I’ve seen the finale, I have to ask, when do you start filming Season 4?

JARED HARRIS: We’re slightly off-topic, but I think they’re planning on it next year sometime. I’m not sure.

TRACY LETTS: Where do you shoot them?

HARRIS: In Prague, mostly.

I just had to bring that up. I will say, Tracy, if you’ve not seen Foundation, it’s a fantastic show. Jumping into why I get to talk to you guys today, what do we need to do as audience members to get Kathryn Bigelow to make more movies?

HARRIS: Go see them.

LETTS: Yeah. Go see House of Dynamite. Go to a movie theater, too. Absolutely see it in the theater if you can. I don’t think our theatrical window is large, but you should take advantage of it because you want to hear it with the big sound, with the big Volker Bertelmann score. You want to experience it with an audience of fellow human beings.

HARRIS: Who are being rung out just the same way you are. There’s that sort of communal building of tension within the room. I think that it only amplifies the experience if you see it when the other people.

It was, without a doubt, one of the most nail-biting experiences I’ve had in a theater in many years.

Jared Harris Knew ‘A House of Dynamite’ Was a Hit

“The script was a page turner.”

Image via Netflix

It is really an intense ride. I’m so curious, what was it like for both of you reading it on the page and then experiencing the finished film?

HARRIS: The script was a page turner, you know? It was very economically written as a script, which is always pleasing. Scripts that go into such massive amounts of detail are quite hard to follow. This gave you just perfect amounts of information, and it drove you right through right to the end. That last page was just… it left you with exactly the thing that the movie experience left you with: “What happens next?”

LETTS: I’m not a good first reader. I couldn’t make heads or tails out of it, to tell you the truth. All the acronyms and the military speak, I didn’t know what the hell I was reading. It took me a few passes to understand what I was reading, and then I think I got it. These people who say they don’t go see the movies, I don’t understand it. Don’t you want to see what everybody else is doing?

HARRIS: I just closed my eyes when I came on screen.

LETTS: I also close my eyes when Jared comes on. [Laughs]

Image via Netflix

One of the things that really struck me is the fantastic camerawork. I’m so curious about the way Kathryn and her DOP work on set. Were there cameras everywhere, similar to how Ridley Scott does it, and you’re not exactly sure what’s being filmed? Can you pull back that curtain?

LETTS: Well, there were a hell of a lot of cameras on set —at least on the Stratcom set there were, because we’ve got all those monitors. At one point, I counted. I had 25 cameras on me. I don’t know that they were all storing information, but I did have 25 cameras on me. But Barry Ackroyd is a great DP, and I find it really interesting that when you think about Barry Ackroyd’s career, you think about two directors. You think about Kathryn Bigelow and Ken Loach. In a sense, they couldn’t be more different, it would seem, in their aesthetic, and yet what Barry does is what all great DPs do: he sees into a moment. His camera somehow finds a way to look into a moment, and in Ken Loach’s movies and in Kathryn’s movies, that’s such an essential thing for a DP to do. It’s so essential to look inside this process that we’re engaged in and find the human beings inside it.

Tracy Letts on Tackling a Role With Conflicting Beliefs

“The truth is that my character makes a pretty good argument.”

Something that I really love about the script is that there are no heroes and no villains; it’s just reality. Can you sort of talk about that aspect?

HARRIS: I think that was the reason why they were very deliberate and determined not to answer the question, and not interested in which party is sitting in the White House. They wanted it to be a bipartisan story where the politics weren’t relevant. Those kinds of politics weren’t relevant. As soon as you make that determination, you immediately see things through the prism of whether you’re on one side or another, and they didn’t want there to be teams in this, because it actually transcends that, as you were saying earlier. It’s beyond politics, if you like.

Tracy, your character wants to strike back, but there is no exact answer as to where we’re supposed to strike back. What is it like playing a character that you might not necessarily agree with, and do you at least agree with the motivations?

LETTS: You know, you don’t necessarily have to agree with a character to play a character, but you do have to have some understanding, and the truth is that my character makes a pretty good argument. Again, it’s not the argument that I, Tracy, would make, but his argument; there is reason behind what he’s saying, and ultimately it’s not his decision. He’s trying to give his best counsel to the president. So, you know, the speech was well-written. Well-written and well-reasoned. So it’s simply a matter of pretending with authority, right? It’s just a matter of letting the costume and the haircut and the set and everything else do that work for you, and then making the argument.

A House of Dynamite is now in select theaters and streaming on Netflix.

Release Date

October 3, 2025

Runtime

113 minutes

Director

Kathryn Bigelow

Writers

Noah Oppenheim

Producers

Brian Bell, Greg Shapiro