Is this a one night stand, or something more? Actor Chris New takes us behind the scenes of a small gay movie which became a huge hit.

Win tickets to go see WEEKEND here.

Intimately intriguing, Weekend is the new British gay hook-up film taking the world by storm. It opened in film festivals without much fanfare, but word-of-mouth accolades have whetted Aussie appetites – the film opened locally last week and us locals agree it lives up to the hype.

The smart and sexy story shows what happens when two men meet for an encounter – though Russell (Tom Cullen) expects a one-night fling, he gets much more than he bargained for with Glen (Chris New). The duo have a connection – but are they ready for more than just a Weekend?

Same Same chatted to Chris about his role in the beguiling boy-meets-boy story…

What critics are enjoying about Weekend is how natural and realistic it all was. It was almost as if we were reading someone’s diary – we got this very personal insight into how two people meet. Being part of the project, was that the intention, to just make it as realistic as possible?

Chris: Yeah, we kind of wanted to make it as specific and real as we could – partly because we knew it was a risk making a film about that subject. Half the producers in the world were saying, ‘No one will ever want to see this film’ and thankfully we’ve proved them wrong. So it’s a mixture of wanting to kind of really work hard to make something very specific, which will hopefully then resonate with other audiences, but also we didn’t really expect anyone to see it! (laughs)

So when we made it, we weren’t really thinking of the audience, we were just thinking about trying to make it as good as possible for ourselves, so we felt like we did a good job. Luckily, people did get to see it so that was a bit of a surprise. I mean, we imagined it would just tour film festivals and go straight to DVD or something… but it seemed to get a life of its own and kind of take off and that was a big surprise for us, we really didn’t expect it.

Was there a point when you realised, ‘Wait a minute, this is bigger than we all expected it would be’?

It’s probably when it opened in America. We had some good feelings from the first few screenings that we had at festivals and things and the film got quite good reviews and good word of mouth but we always thought, ‘Oh, well that’s a nice surprise but it’ll probably end there’. We were kind of like, ‘Well, that’s great, that’s a good result’ and we didn’t really expect it to go any further and then it just kind of kept going and kept going and kept going. Here, in London, it has been playing here in the cinemas since November or October or something and it’s still playing! We can’t really believe it, it’s very strange.

Because there’s now been a lot of talk around the film with everyone raving about it, you do get that sense that people go along with that expectation of it being incredible.

Yeah, it can be a dangerous thing to have really strong word of mouth like that. There was one guy when we went to the London Film Festival, we went to the first screening with Andrew, Tristan, Tom and I and as we were about to go in to do the question and answer session at the end of the screening, a guy kind of pushed his way out of the door (laughs). I thought, ‘Oh, here we go’ because he didn’t seem very happy, so I called out to him and said, ‘Have you enjoyed it?’ He turned around and said, ‘Well, no actually, I thought it was fucking boring!’ (laughs) So I just said to him, ‘Alright, well fuck you!’ and he walked off into the night.

There’s one hater in every crowd.

I don’t know… it was one of those films where because we worked on it very hard and very quickly, it was a very intense shoot because we were just trying to get everything done so quickly. It was really relaxed but intense at the same time.

All of us have a pride over the film – there’s quite a strong sense that people’s opinions about the film didn’t really matter to us afterwards, we were just glad that we got it made.

I get people everyday on Twitter saying that they had just seen the film and that they’ve really enjoyed it. That they’ve found something really powerful from it or they’ve just had a really great experience watching something they haven’t seen before and that’s just a really nice thing to happen. I class reviews, awards, public feedback on Twitter and all that as kind of exactly the same thing, you’re just glad that people kind of understood what you’re going on about.