Focus Features
This article contains spoilers for "Obsession."
Curry Barker's crowd-pleasing "Obsession" has become one of the most surprising box office stories in the nearly 20 years that I've been writing about movies on the internet. The film, which cost under a million dollars to produce, has had astonishing legs, even beating "Avengers: Endgame" in its 25th day of release. Naturally, that's resulted in a lot of attention being paid to the film, so when the home media release rolled around and a new round of interview opportunities came up, I jumped at the chance to speak with Cooper Tomlinson, who plays the supporting role of Ian, the best friend of the film's protagonist, Bear (Michael Johnston).
I asked Tomlinson about Ian's evolution from when he first read a draft of "Obsession" to the final cut, and the actor revealed that one of the movie's biggest twists — that Ian has secretly been hooking up with the object of Bear's affection, Nikki (Inde Navarrette), behind Bear's back — was not initially in the script:
"[Ian] was always the cocky, funny, playful friend who's kind of an a**hole. But the whole reveal of him sleeping with Nikki, that wasn't originally in there. That eventually found its way into the script through a few drafts, which just made him that much more evil and interesting."
It's surprising that Ian and Nikki's deception wasn't originally part of the script, since it feels like a crucial piece of the story. Tomlinson has collaborated with Barker for years on YouTube and is set to reunite with him for his next movie, "Anything But Ghosts," so I have to wonder if the two collaborators cooked this up as a way to add more depth to the Ian character and give Tomlinson another shade to play.
Cooper Tomlinson thinks Ian is partially responsible for the horrific events of Obsession
Focus Features
Though Bear is the film's protagonist, he's clearly the villain. He's infatuated with Nikki yet too cowardly to tell her how he feels, and when he wishes for her to love him more than anyone else in the world, he effectively traps her inside her own body against her will. When I asked Cooper Tomlinson if he considers Ian to be toxic in his own way, he responded in the affirmative:
"Yes. I don't know if he'd make a wish like that, or once he'd figure out it was real to keep going through with it. But he gives bad advice, and he stirred the pot, and he set a lot of these things in motion. He gave Bear this false confidence to try something, and it, honestly, thinking about it, changes the trajectory of the movie for Nikki and for Bear. It's very sad. It shows everybody's true colors."
It sounds like Tomlinson puts a significant portion of the blame for the film's events on Ian's shoulders, but I don't agree. While Ian added some fuel to the fire, Bear is the true villain here. Hearing the real Nikki beg for the sweet release of death and replying, "What's so bad about being with me?" is selfish, twisted behavior. "Freaky Nikki" has naturally earned a lot of attention, but make no mistake: Bear's the real monster.
You can hear my full interview with Cooper Tomlinson on the July 8, 2026 episode of the /Film Weekly podcast. In the meantime, you can listen to the conversation I had about "Obsession" with some of my colleagues when it first debuted and check out our interview with writer/director Curry Barker below:
English (US) ·