Born on YouTube, the highly fictional character Onyx the Fortuitous took to the big screen during the 2023 Sundance Film Festival in Onyx the Fortuitous and the Talisman of Souls.
Onyx (created and played by Andrew Bowser) searches for a new life and is enticed by his idol Bartok the Great (Jeffery Combs) into summoning a demon. Things quickly take a turn for the worse when the group of summoners must fight for their souls.
In an exclusive interview with uInterview founder Erik Meers, Bowser discussed how he got started with the YouTube show.
“While shooting at E3 in LA, I ran off with a camera operator and made a video package for a YouTube channel called GameSmash, which doesn’t exist, and I appeared as Onyx for the first time in that video,” he said. “It got circulated and went viral and it made me want to make another. So the second time around I used an existing news video from Detroit about a satanic temple being unveiled and I filmed myself out on the street in Burbank and sliced it into that video. That was very very widespread. So I just kept doing that, repeating that format with him over the years.”
Bowser also talked about his favorite moment from shooting the film.
“One [moment] that really stuck with me was the sequence where Onyx speaks to a little demon in a box and is thrown into a flashback, which was also a payoff for some backstory that I had mentioned in previous Onyx videos but delved deeper into than I have previously,” Bowser revealed.
“That scene was shot on our last day of filming in Massachusetts at 6 a.m. after an overnight, so to be so fried from these overnights and to be in an emotional state and feel vulnerable and also already getting emotional because film production was wrapping, and to be interacting with one of my favorite creatures of the movie, that was a really full circle moment,” he continued. “And also to be performing a scene that we hope kind of takes the character to an even more serious place is exciting to me. So, I think filming that box scene was one of my favorite memories.”
