#West Side Story’s Jets And Sharks Got Into Character With A LARPing Weekend [Exclusive]

Spielberg’s “West Side Story” is coming 60 years after the original Academy Award-winning film adaptation, starring Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer. The world has changed a lot since then, and now there is a thing called LARPing (Live Action Role Playing), which you may have seen featured on “Hawkeye” recently if you’ve been keeping up with that Disney+ series. Believe it or not, Faist and his co-stars did a little LARPing while they were getting into character for “West Side Story.” He explained:

“One of the things that came about after that meeting were these ‘Jet-tivities’ that we decided to do. That’s what we called them. Everybody got to choose an activity, and no matter what it was, we all had to do it. So we did a bunch of shenanigans that summer. That was so much fun.

“We rented a house in upstate New York in Rhinebeck with the Sharks and hung out for a weekend. Played laser tag. We went LARPing. Do you know what that is? … We thought it would be fun, like silly, playing pretend. But it gets like intense, and we were actually beating the crap out of each other. We did a whole bunch of stuff, and we really just bonded and spent a lot of time, and I don’t think there was a single day where – not one of us was alone. We were always together at one point, either in small groups or as a whole. I’m really proud of the work that we did and building those relationships, and I think that that shows.”

“West Side Story” is in theaters now.