After amassing a global and passionate fanbase for Netflix’s The Night Agent, star Gabriel Basso is exploring the world of screenwriting and directing, and the themes he’s chosen to explore are quite heavy. Iconoclast is a taut psychological thriller in which Basso himself stars as a recluse named Connor whose obsession with a live-streaming influencer takes over his entire life.

While Connor focuses his energy on Nika (Yellowjackets star Courtney Eaton) to the exclusion of all else, he still has one tentative tether to reality in the form of his colleague Morgan (Rain Spencer, who has amassed her own fervent fanbase thanks to The Summer I Turned Pretty). The film also stars Kiernan Shipka and Noah Centineo, both of whom have also experienced the highs and lows of social media-friendly television shows. While that is not directly what Iconoclast is about, it does tie into the central theme of prioritizing online connection over human interaction.

Prior to Iconoclast‘s Tribeca Festival premiere, Gabriel Basso and Rain Spencer sat down with ScreenRant’s Ash Crossan for a frank discussion about the social and personal origins of the film, Basso’s experience as a first-time director, and Spencer’s view of her character as the optimistic core of the otherwise bleak narrative.

Gabriel Basso Directed Iconoclast With No Ego

ScreenRant: Gabriel, this is your directorial debut. You wrote, directed, produced, and starred in it. Which hat surprised you the most once you were actually on set, and what was the biggest challenge for you?

Gabriel Basso: Writing was easy because you’re alone in a room with a laptop. The acting thing came pretty naturally. I don’t like watching playback because I don’t like watching myself, so it was a cool experience for me to send it, then design the shots and get all the work done with Lula (the camera operator and DP), Bill (the gaffer), and Brendan (the grip). I worked with the crew to design it, then forgot all that to act. Then, I go to them and say, “How are we technically? Because I felt good in that scene.”

One of my favorite shots at the end is when I go to meet her on the pizza shop date, and I go to get out of the car, but the phone goes off, and I get back in. Originally, I wasn’t getting out. Bill, the gaffer, came up to me and was like, “I’m not believing that you were this much closer to a better life. Go out there and open the door.” So, that was his call, but I’m in the scene. It was tough to delineate those roles when I was in it. But as the director, being able to make the adjustment and then trust the crew that was there watching it was a cool experience for me.

ScreenRant: Rain, what was unique about being directed by Gabriel, especially given that he is also an actor?

Rain Spencer: The whole thing was unique. I had never experienced acting alongside my director before, which was really cool. Just the ease with which he went from actor brain to director brain was inspiring to watch because I’d always thought it just seemed so challenging in my head. It seems like two completely different parts of your brain, and he made it look effortless, which was really inspiring and cool.

Gabriel Basso: Ultimately, I think the reason it was easy is that there was a lot of work that went into the pre-production side. I got a lot of my directing done in pre-production. I didn’t have to sit there and micromanage people on set because I’d walked them through everything. And I was there early – a couple of hours before, technically, I as the actor would’ve shown up – and walked through the whole scene. So, I knew what was going to happen.

But as far as the acting and directing overlap side, it’s all ultimately surrendered to narrative. It really is all in service of the story; it’s not about the director. This isn’t a Gabriel Basso movie. To me, the more important thing is: what is the narrative, and what is your impact as the audience? And that’s how I was directing in the scene. It wasn’t like, “I really want to see this be more like this,” or, “I envisioned this setup.” It was, “What serves the narrative the best?”

That’s why there was limited shot selection, and why we built choreography around coverage. Because sometimes, for example, there are a couple of shots where the point of the shot is for Connor to feel isolated. Why would I go in for a close-up there? It doesn’t make sense. Building in the narrative to the shot selection obviously is pretty basic, but then allowing that to inform the actual acting and directing — that’s why it was easy. Because I knew what the point of the movie was, ultimately.

The Birthplace Of Iconoclast, As Explained By Its Director & Star

ScreenRant: I want to hear the backstory. There are people who think they know others online, and there’s also a loneliness epidemic. Plus, I think COVID changed a lot of things. Where did this idea start for you?

Gabriel Basso: I was just thinking about arrogance and the parasocial nature of your brain. Your brain doesn’t do gaps. It wants to fill in gaps, and there’s no way to know someone in their entirety online. So, your brain is naturally going to try to fill in what you don’t know.

I think South Park made a whole joke about this early on, but I was curious about how they created an idol out of Britney Spears, and then they sacrificed her. I genuinely think it makes people feel very powerful to create this idol in their head of the person, and then it makes them feel even more powerful to destroy that idol.

To me, it’s the disturbing reality that, in an era or in a society where we’re all starved of connection, everyone is funneled and driven into what connection is available, and then they convince themselves that it’s real. And then that person becomes their own sort of god in someone’s life that they can control.

This cyclinal and toxic pattern is known as parasocialism, and while it crops up mostly when attached to music and media fandoms, it infects society at large. Putting celebrities up on pedestals just to tear them down has always been a cruel and common act, but the age of the internet has made it part of many people’s daily routine, which Basso speaks to in his film

Gabriel Basso: That is ultimately the most disturbing thing about social media and stuff to me: You can control the interaction, and that’s not how this works in real life. I can’t press mute on you in person. I think people get so addicted to the control over the relationship that, in real life, it becomes an overwhelming thing because that control is taken from you. And all of it is sort of this amalgam of arrogance and ego and a god complex.

The scary thing to me is that when that’s taken from someone, they feel like, “How dare you? How dare you take that from me?” And that’s not the most disturbing part of the movie to me. The fact that she goes, “I’m stepping away,” and he feels wronged by that decision — that’s the most disturbing moment in the movie to me. Because the only influence that she has in his life is what he’s allowed her to have; what he’s welcomed. To punish her for stepping away and not actually valuing her as a human being is what’s scary to me.

I think the birthplace of it all was just being disturbed by that. But also, Suchir Balaji was an OpenAI programmer who was found in his kitchen. He shot himself twice in the head. Apparently, pieces of his scalp were in the kitchen, but he basically came out against OpenAI and was like, “They’re violating copyright laws,” and then all of a sudden he was dead. So, I also had this conspiracy-brained, like, “Oh, these companies that are only out for one end. How would they prey on the human desire for connection? And how would they use that to further their own influence?” Because they’re clearly not afraid of killing people.

ScreenRant: You both come from shows with big global fandoms. I’m sure people have impressions of what they think they know about you. Did you feel a personal connection to the material?

Rain Spencer: Yeah, I think that whole thing is so true, that thinking you know someone off Instagram is scary. I mean, it’s an impossible thing to know someone offline.

But it has been really interesting to see some of these topics through Connor’s experience, and ultimately through a male perspective. For me, I have learned a lot from this specific experience — the specific isolation and perspective of a man having a parasocial relationship with a woman.

Gabriel Basso: Well, you even see it now with Gen Z. They’re talking about Gen Z is not having sex anymore. And that, to me, is because it’s transactional at that point. It’s not actual connection; it’s just an impulse. I think these younger generations are used to seeing sex through transaction, when all they want is connection. Sex has been destroyed through porn. No one knows how to connect anymore.

Rain Spencer: Yeah. And how do you connect with someone if you’re not taught how to connect? How do you teach yourself how to build that? I think it’s so scary, that element of control that a man thinks he has.

Rain Spencer’s Morgan Is The Hope At The Heart Of Iconoclast

Courtesy of Instar Images

ScreenRant: Morgan is really the one keeping Connor tethered to reality — or at least attempting to. So how did you think about her place in his life?

Rain Spencer: Something I so appreciate about Morgan is how much she’s able to access her feelings, and it’s coming from a total three-year-old brain. It’s not developed, and she doesn’t know how to be like, “Okay, I’m going to pause right now. What’s actually going on?” The whole time she’s like, “Come get into reality. Come into reality. Emote. Be a human. Be a person with me. I know you’re in there.” And he’s just stuck.

Gabriel Basso: That’s what’s sad. For every Morgan, there’s a Connor that’s afraid of connection, because he does turn down Emily at the bar. But then with Morgan, it takes him a second to get out of his head.

I told Rain when we first Zoomed about this role that she was the hope of this movie. She’s the most human person in the movie. Unapologetically human, and a failure, and weird in a lot of ways. She’s uncomfortable and chaotic, but she is human. Connor has one foot in reality, but also in this fictional reality that he’s created for himself. I think her role in the movie, arguably, is more important as a human being watching it. All you want is for them to work out.

I was talking to a buddy about this. He watched the movie, and he remembered there being a kiss. I was like, “No, all they did was hold hands.” But he remembered it being more intimate than it was because of how pure it was. I think that, to me, is ultimately what I wanted people to feel in the movie. All they do is hug. There’s one moment where they hold hands, and it feels like a victory.

Rain Spencer: In my head, they’re two three-year-olds at the playground — so stunted and scared. In middle school, you make arrangements to hug your crush. “Oh, they just hugged. I’m floored. They’re going to hug.” And that’s because it’s so scary.

Gabriel Basso: Relative to where you see Connor in the movie, dealing with this imagined woman and this projection of her in his life, and sinking all his time into his computer, then seeing them hug, to me, is just so heartbreaking.

You can’t write what you don’t know. So for me, it comes from growing up wanting connection, but watching everyone slip into their own isolated, curated versions of reality and denying people around them connection in the name of connecting with the entire world.

The illusion is that you’re connecting with someone in Europe somewhere, when your next-door neighbor is Connor, and he’s in this headspace of just, “I want a human connection.” He gets coffee every day, and you pass him every single day. I think that’s the death of this society we’ve created, under the illusion of connection far away. What’s attractive is that you can control it. You can get a call and say, “No, I don’t want to do this right now.”

Rain Spencer: You can go be in a coffee shop, and it’s weird to talk to somebody in a coffee shop. How does that make sense?

Gabriel Basso: It’s Beauty and the Beast, when he’s like, “Show me Belle,” and he’s talking to his scrying mirror. That’s Connor in his cell, in his apartment, and he’s like, “Show me Nika.” He’s not connecting. He’s literally just spying. You think it’s a connection, but it’s not, and it’s not reciprocal. You’re dumping all your energy into a well, and it’s never coming back at you. You’re just pouring it away. I think that’s the illusion of connectivity. It’s that sunk-cost fallacy of, “I’ve put so much time into this thing that it has to be real.” But it’s never reciprocated.

And I think that’s a failure of society to recognize that at no point will someone on social media get into your life. We’re siphoning all our energy into this well, and we don’t know where it’s going, but it is going to Meta, f–king Zuckerberg’s demonic algorithm.

ScreenRant: What do you hope people take away from the film after they see it?

Gabriel Basso: My hope is that you’re just like, “Man, I pass this kid every day. I know this guy. It doesn’t have to be transactional, and I don’t have to get anything out of it.”

Talking to people and going out in public — if you notice, everyone in the coffee shop’s on their phone, or the majority of the people in the bar are on their phones. I almost cried the other day at the airport. It sounds crazy to say this, but I was walking through the airport, and one of those bomb-sniffing dogs walked by. There was a family: a dad, a mom, their son, and their daughter. The daughter was probably 11, the son was 6. The family are on their iPads, on their phones, and this dog comes by and sniffs the little girl and keeps moving.

When she realized no one saw that interaction, none of her family members were present for that with her, it was soul-crushing to me. That was a moment where she was looking for some connection with her family, and they were all off doing their own thing. It was the Morgan. It was pure, “A dog just sniffed my leg,” and there was nothing.

I think that’s the goal ultimately: to just realize you know this guy, and he’s not a bad person. Nothing he’s doing is bad. He’s going to the gym. He has a job. He’s not a bad guy. I think a lot of the narrative right now is male isolation and loneliness, and they’re dangerous, and they’re lashing out, and they’re crazy. And some of them are, but a lot of them just want to connect with a human being. The reason they lash out is that there’s no humanity left in society. It’s that Sun Tzu thing of never fully enveloping an enemy, because you don’t give them a choice but to fight. Whereas if you sort of partially envelop them, they’ll be focused on the hope, they’ll turn their backs on you, and there’ll be fewer casualties on your side.

I think a lot of young men are just feeling enveloped completely. There are no options, and it’s a scary place to be. And now everyone’s an enemy because no one is your friend. But that’s my hope.

Rain Spencer: What I think Morgan would say is to just be to 100% fully feel your feelings. To not go into this insular space. It’s safe to connect!

It’s in the little things, like the small thoughts that you change on a daily basis. It doesn’t have to be a grand gesture that’s like, “I’m changing.” It’s like, “Oh, I had this thought, and I recognize I had that thought. I’m going to shift it right now in real time, and I’m just going to continue to do that.”

Gabriel Basso: Yeah, there is hope. I don’t like to demoralize people. This movie’s a warning shot of, “Hey, there are forces that are preying upon you and your desire for connection. Walk away from them.” It’s not, “This is how it’s going to be, and this is our future.”