Kurt Russell Offers His Thoughts Regarding the Ending of THE THING and Who's Hosting the Alien
Kurt Russell recently talked to GQ, and during that conversation, the actor shared his thoughts on the ending of John Carpenter’s The Thing and which survivor is the host at the end of the film. This has been an ongoing debate with fans over the years. Carpenter says that he’s the only one who knows who the Thing is, but director of photography Dean Cundey has claimed that the answer fans are looking for is in the eyes of the final two characters left alive. As for what Russell thinks, he says:
“John was never quite satisfied with the last scene. His main thing was he didn’t want to take the audience on a ride for two hours and bring [them] back to square one. When you’re doing a movie, you don’t know what you got. You kind of in general know what you got, but you don’t know exactly how this is gonna go together and what’s gonna come out of it. And of course John did almost all the time because you understand—you know, he’s unlike most guys.”
Russell continued to talk about the final scene of the film:
“But the last scene, what we talked about a lot, we tried out little different versions of it: ‘What do you think of that?’ ... you go back and forth.‘I know you don’t want to come back to square one—it’s kind of what it is. We don’t even know if we’re real. We don’t even know.’ We don’t know, we don’t know.”
The actor loves the mystery of the ending and leaves it to the audience to decide:
“I think the audience can figure it out. I think that’s what makes The Thing great, is you don’t know. What if it’s already happened? Are you you? How would you know? And that all led itself down to what was the last line I said, I think it’s just like, ‘Why don’t we just sit here for a while, see what happens?’ If [the two characters] could figure out a way to kill each other in exactly the same time, I think maybe that’s the next step there. That, to me was John at maybe his absolute peak as a director. That’s really good filmmaking.”
I’ve always liked the mystery of the ending and not definitively knowing. But, I’ve always thought that Russell’s MacReady ended up being the new host. What are your thoughts on the ending of The Thing?
Watch video below, where Russell also shares his thoughts on Escape From New York, Guardians of the Galaxy, his Quentin Tarantino movie roles, and more.