Sting: Ryan Corr isn’t fazed by gigantic killer spiders, but there’s a creepy crawly that makes his skin crawl

In the first season of the blockbuster Games Of Throne prequel, House Of The Dragon, Aussie actor Ryan Corr played Ser Harwin “Breakbones” Strong, one of the most fearless knights in all of the Seven Kingdoms. In the new Aussie horror Sting, the actor comes up against a gigantic killer spider, which might be the stuff of nightmares for some viewers, but it isn’t for Corr. “I’m OK with them,” he tells STM over a video call. “Actually, I’ll tell you what, I’m not a big fan of Christmas beetles, I had this absolutely traumatic moment in my childhood, and I know that sounds ridiculous, but you got to hit the story.” After bracing himself to dredge up this terrifying moment from his past, Corr launches into his anecdote. “Do you remember The Mummy (starring Brendan Fraser), and the scarab beetles that would swarm all over you and you’d be, like, a skeleton? I was terrified of those,” Corr begins. “Well, after I’d seen The Mummy . . . I think I was about six years old in a bathroom, when I remember what was, for my money, a giant scarab creature coming down onto the toilet. “And I screamed, I was smashing at the walls, I was tearing at toilet paper to throw, because I thought it was a scarab, and I screamed so much that my uncle and my father came and busted through the door, thinking that there must have been a snake in the toilet or something.” Other than provide an excellent premise for another horror movie based around a creature that inhabits an Aussie loo — working title: The Dunny — Corr says the experience gives him empathy for Sting director Kiah Roache-Turner. An award-winning director of music videos, Roache-Turner burst onto the movie scene with the hilariously exaggerated zombie franchise Wyrmwood. He’s also terrified of spiders, so what else would he choose to make a horror film about. “I’m like a dedicated, lifelong arachnophobic,” Roache-Turner admits to STM. “Anything with eight legs, I don’t trust . . . so, basically, the impetus for this story was to try and think of the worst thing that I possibly could, and a giant spider . . . that’s going to bite you and drag you into an air-conditioning duct and eat you, well, I couldn’t think of anything worse than that.” The director enlisted the acclaimed Kiwi creature workshop Weta, of Lord Of The Rings fame, to create a working spider model for the film, which was just one of the things Corr had to endure on set. “Every day I was rocking up at eight in the morning, fresh faced, and then just sort of being covered in different types of goop,” the actor laughs. “Five people surrounding you in a circle, covering you in lube and goo and rubber web.” The low-budget practical effects on Sting were a literal world away from what the actor experienced on House Of The Dragon. “It was a pinch-yourself moment . . . just having budgets that are sort of unimaginable, and walking on to operational castles . . . and everyone’s in costumes that have taken meticulous designers years to make beforehand,” Corr recalls. “When you rock up on a job like that, I’m always just saying, in my mind, ‘Don’t screw it up’.” Sting is in cinemas on July 18.