Elizabeth Banks reveals which ‘Cocaine Bear’ character had an even gorier death in original cut

Filmmaker teases a bloodier director’s cut of horror-comedy.

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Cocaine Bear.

Filmmaker Elizabeth Banks had no problem taking a blood-soaked approach to making her just-released Cocaine Bear, about a bear who goes berserk after ingesting illegal drugs.

“I love gore,” says the director, whose new film stars Keri Russell, Margo Martindale, and the late Ray Liotta, among others. “I think it’s really fun. I think it’s a way to process traumatic things in a sort of outrageous way. It’s always struck me as very funny in a weird way. I just didn’t think we could make a movie about a rampaging bear on a bender without the gore. I mean, bears literally eat their prey alive.”

Banks does admit that she decided to tone down the gore, though, when it came to the death of one character: Kristofer Hivju’s hiker Olaf, who is killed by the titular animal toward the end of the movie.

“At the very end of the process, we ended up cutting back on a few shots of gore in the third act of the film,” says the filmmaker. “I just felt at that point the audience was on more of an emotional journey and I didn’t want to distract from it. So, for instance, Olaf, the hiker who gets murdered, we had some incredible prosthetics of him, they ripped off his whole face, and we had a close-up of it that is no longer in the movie. Maybe in the director’s cut we’ll get some of that back in.”

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