Sam C. Wilson plays Trap Jaw in the Masters of the Universe film, and from the moment he sat down with us, it was clear this role was no casual booking. The Welsh actor spent months deep in comic book research, grueling strongman training, and five-hour makeup sessions before he ever stepped on set. Watch the full conversation on YouTube.
Getting Into the Fandom First
Wilson grew up in Wales in the 1990s, and he describes the American 1980s as a kind of mythology to him, something he knew through imports like The Goonies, The Lost Boys, and Saved by the Bell. He-Man was woven into all of that. When the role was confirmed, he treated the preparation as an act of respect toward the source material and toward the fans who grew up with it firsthand.
He went back to the original lore, tracing how Trap Jaw ended up disfigured, why the character carries so much anger, and what the look needed to communicate physically. YouTube breakdowns, web research, and a close read of the comics all fed into his thinking before he ever touched a weight.
“I went into the original, where Cronis is from and how he ended up losing his jaw and that kind of thing. I kind of had the idea that he’s angry because he’s been disfigured, which was good,” Wilson said.
He also knew early on that Hafthor Bjornsson was already attached to the film, and that context shaped how he thought about Trap Jaw’s physicality. The character lugs metal around, eats food whole in Wilson’s imagination of him, and carries real pain in every movement. That picture drove the training plan.
The Strongman Build
Wilson is already a big guy, and he was upfront about the route he did not take to get bigger. He wanted farmer-strong, not chemically assisted. Growing up around Welsh rugby players gave him a frame of reference for that specific kind of mass, and he built toward it over six months of high-calorie eating and heavy compound lifts. By the end of that stretch he was pressing 60 kilograms per hand on the bench.
“The costume isn’t going to meet me. I need to meet the costume,” Wilson said.
That instinct came directly from the concept art. Once he saw the enormous robotic legs and the tied-on arm in the designs, he understood what his silhouette needed to be. He had to fill the costume from the inside out, not rely on it to do the work for him.
[product slug=”motu-origins-battle-for-subternia-4-pack”]Five Hours in the Chair
The makeup process ran about five hours each time, and Wilson walked through every stage of it. His head was shaved, his beard came off, and his body was completely cleared of hair. The prosthetics team, working under Barry Gower, built up two silicone facial pieces and a helmet that had been iterated from 3D scans of Wilson’s own head. A separate mandible piece attached to his chin so that Trap Jaw’s mechanical jaw moved with his real mouth.
The blue skin was the part that surprised me most hearing him describe it. They could not simply spray him down. Instead, the team dabbed on layer after layer of color, building up tones the way a tattoo cover-up works, cycling through different hues to simulate the vascular system and the texture of actual moving skin. In HD, it had to read as flesh, not paint.
“By the time you’ve been looking in the mirror and seeing all of this, I would start to listen to a lot of Korn. So like people would see that on my post, I’ve been putting Korn songs and ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls,’” by Metallica Wilson said.
Removing everything at the end of the day was its own ordeal. The paint was not water soluble because it had to survive sweat. Only alcohol-based solvents would break it down, and the process was uncomfortable enough that the team could only realistically do it a couple of days a week.
Moving in 20 Kilograms of Robotic Legs
On top of the makeup, the costume introduced a separate set of physical challenges. The trousers alone weighed over 20 kilograms, worn with a weight belt. Wilson’s hearing was blocked by the helmet, and scleral contact lenses covered the full white of his eyes in green and yellow, which meant his vision was severely limited during fight scenes. He was candid about pulling the lenses for certain sequences because full-contact choreography with Idris Elba in the dark was not a situation he wanted to navigate half-blind.
The weight in the legs became something he folded into the performance. That heavy, deliberate sway turned into a kind of mechanical gait, a stillness in the head and a lumbering quality in the body that read as genuinely threatening on screen.
“I couldn’t see much and I was fighting like full on,” Wilson said.
Working with Liang Yang
The fight choreography was handled by Liang Yang, the stunt coordinator behind the white bathroom sequence in Mission: Impossible that pretty much anyone who has seen it can picture instantly. Wilson described him as someone who commands a room effortlessly, the kind of figure who can be eating a microwave meal between takes while every physical performer in the building watches for his next note.
“He’s hilarious as well because sometimes he’d say, ‘Brother, brother, brother, just do it like this,’ proceeds to do like, you know, Bruce Lee level shit, and you’re like, ‘Yeah, I am trying,’” Wilson said.
Wilson and Yang stayed in touch after filming wrapped, which Wilson treated as something genuinely uncommon. The encouragement ran both ways on set, with Yang texting him after takes to tell him the work was landing.
[product slug=”mission-impossible-movie-collection-blu-ray”]A Daughter, a Phone, and 48 Hours Back on Set
Production overlapped with his partner Kayle’s due date, and Wilson kept his phone close on set during that stretch. His partner is a midwife, and their daughter Juno was born at home. The timing worked out in the most cinematic way possible: Wilson had come home for a long weekend, Kayle mentioned feeling crampy that morning, he went for a run, and came back to 13 missed calls.
“I was back in painted blue 48 hours after,” Wilson said.
He credited his prosthetics team, Pat, Emma, and Mike, working under Barry Gower, as his real support system through that stretch. They would come over between takes under the pretense of checking his glue, quietly telling him the last take looked great. Small gestures, but he made a point of naming every one of them.
The Cast, the Chemistry, and the Premiere
Wilson talked at length about what the cast group chat looks like in practice. When someone catches a negative comment online, they message the others and the responses come flooding in. He described a functioning support system that formed organically over the shoot and has held together since. By the time of the Hollywood premiere, many of them had not seen each other for over a year, and the green room turned into a genuine reunion.
“It’s a proper friendship group in the ways that are supportive as well. It’s been really good,” Wilson said.
The premiere itself was new territory for Wilson in terms of scale. He has done BAFTA screenings for TV projects, but a full Hollywood red carpet was a different thing entirely. What grounded it, he said, was the franchise fans in attendance, the Club Grayskull crowd who showed up knowing every character and cheering for each of them. He called them a lightning rod for all the intensity of the night.
The Bolo Tie, Metallica, and What Comes Next
The Trap Jaw bolo tie Wilson wore to the premiere is a one-of-one piece commissioned from Barry Gower’s team. They took a bolo tie base and 3D printed and painted their way to a fully realized Trap Jaw medallion. Wilson said he does not feel entirely worthy of it given the collectibles he has seen other fans carry, but he wears it with obvious pride.
The first album he ever owned turns out to be directly connected to the role. His dad picked him up from school after exams, handed him a copy of Metallica’s Ride the Lightning from Virgin Megastore, because a young Wilson had fallen for “For Whom the Bell Tolls” on a compilation. That track became the song he played to get into character for Trap Jaw, a connection he had never consciously made until the question came up in the interview.
“That is the song that I listen to to get ready to play Trap Jaw. And I didn’t know that they were connected,” Wilson said.
As for what is next: Wilson is in Blade Runner 2099 alongside Michelle Yeoh, Hunter Schafer, Tom Burke, and a substantial ensemble, appearing as himself rather than under prosthetics. He also has a BBC series called California Avenue with Helena Bonham Carter and Bill Nighy in the pipeline. A couple of other projects are in final conversations, under NDA, and he refused to say a word about them on the grounds of not wanting to jinx anything.
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