Despite being set in California, the world premiere of San Andreas took place in London last night. With the sun shining and shades galore, every single person at the premiere, including the press, was there for one man, Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, but we’ll get to him later. The majority of the principal cast showed up including some people I had never heard of before like Morgan Griffin, Alec Utgoff and Art Parkinson (apparently he’s in Game of Thrones, I should really start watching that). But there were some faces I did recognise. One of which was Kylie Minogue, who has a small cameo in the film. Sadly I wasn’t able to talk to her, but the chance to see her in person was really cool and I have confirmation that she is really tiny. Carla Gugino, who plays Emma in the film, was also in attendance but before she could talk to us, she was ushered away to talk to Alex Zane. This did become a recurring theme throughout the evening of actors getting very close to us but then being lead away from us. Curse You Mr. Zane!
But I did manage to talk to some people and sneak in on other people’s interviews. I did talk to the director of San Andreas, Brad Peyton whose previous film was family film Journey 2: The Mysterious Island. He told me the reason he changed from a family friendly film to a big disaster movie was because he loves the big epics and saw San Andreas as the perfect opportunity to make the film he has always wanted to make. Another person I very briefly spoke to was Alexandra Daddario who plays Blake. She talked about working with Dwayne and while he can very intimidating to look at, he was a great individual to be around on set. He is apparently a true professional and one of the nicest people she’s ever worked with. I can confirm that Alexandra is correct when Dwayne Johnson turned up to talk to us. Again we didn’t get much time with him but he was nice person and tried to answer as many questions as possible before having to move on. One big question he was asked was why he took on this role as Ray. He said because he wasn’t your stereotypical action hero, as a helicopter rescue pilot, the character is a very blue collar individual who people can sympathise with and relate to.
Another big part of the night was Dwayne Johnson attempting to break a world record for the most selfies in three minutes. He had to achieve 75 selfies and ended up destroying the record with 105 selfies in three minutes. After a record-breaking premiere, everyone went in to take their places for the screening of San Andreas. While we didn’t get to talk to everyone we wanted to, to just be in presence of so many great actors was really cool. The people we spoke to were really nice, I am now a little in love with Alexandra Daddario and meeting Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson is a dream come true.
This is truly a night I’ll never forget.
San Andreas opens in cinemas on 29th May, 2015.
