Myrna Velasco: You know, my whole life I’ve been hearing the grumblings of the Tomato movies as well. My parents were very learned vegetable people, if you will. Not people who are made of vegetables, but people who understand vegetables. My father was a gardener, and I grew up really knowing in the back of my mind that tomatoes are out there, and this role was really kind of thrust upon me. I got the first ask to present what I thought would have been the right way to encounter killer tomatoes as a federal vegetable investigator, and the process as an actor is you go through these auditions and callbacks and whatnot, and I was just told, “This is your job now. This is what you have to do. It is your calling.” So I just took on the mantle and am really trying to make it as clear as possible that these vegetables are out here, and it’s not safe.

Noor Razooky: I play Dr. Angela in the film. I am a marine biologist. I successfully grow tomatoes in salt water. I was essentially born to play this, considering my entire life, my physics teacher father would only show respect to math and science, so it seemed like that was the path I would have to take. I grew my first tomato at a very young age, through seed and soil, traditionally, and I would check on those tomato plants every single day in my childhood bedroom through the blinds.

I’d watch its progress until one day I heard the sound of gardeners, and a weed whacker engine was roaring and rumbling and shaking my house, and I thought, “Oh my God, something must have gone wrong.” So I went back to my blinds, and I checked through my childhood window, and my tomato plant had gone. Immediately, visceral reaction. My chest got tight, my fingers started to constrict, my heart rate went up, and I was like, “They have no idea what they have done. They have no idea the retaliation that will come after this chopping, this carnage that happened in my backyard.”

And so I thought to myself, “the safest way to continue growing tomatoes going forward is in the ocean, where there will be no gardeners chopping it down, I’ll have full control over them,” until we realized that these tomatoes are actually plotting and communicating through almost like a fungal mycelium network, and like Dan said earlier, the truth came to me a little bit later. I was in it for the science, not the conspiracy, until …you know, data doesn’t lie.

This is starting to sound like your classic The Last of Us situation. That’s very troubling, I would say. You’ve mentioned gardeners a couple of times. Where are they in the context of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes? Are they allies in the fight against the tomatoes, or willing collaborators with them?

Dan Bakkedahl: Look, from eight to 80, we need as many hands as we can get, you know. So, regardless of what you do for a living, it’s your fight too. This is the fight for humanity. I mean, I would imagine that a gardener is going to have a greater knowledge, but he may also have a greater sympathy for these creatures.