Motorheads Cast Talks Love Triangles, Music, and Cars: “I Don’t Even Have My License!”
A group of high school outsiders form an unlikely friendship over a love of street racing, while diving deeper into family secrets in Prime Video’s new series Motorheads. Pop Culture Planet’s Kristen Maldonado spoke with the cast about love triangles, music, and cars.
Each character in Motorheads has their own personal issues they’re dealing with as they explore identity and the desire to prove themselves through the lens of car culture. “I have a habit of playing very unapologetically themselves teenagers,” said Melissa Collazo who quickly connected to her character of teen car mechanic Caitlyn. She and her brother Zac are new to town and eager to learn more about their missing father’s legacy as Ironwood’s resident racing urban legend. “I learned very quickly to be comfortable being alone and not speaking if I had nothing to say. Reading the script, I very quickly noticed that in Caitlyn. She's comfortable being alone and she's comfortable in silence. She doesn't feel the need to fill it. I think she's very confident and outspoken, but at the same time quiet and reserved.”
Then there’s Curtis, played by Uriah Shelton, who battles with right and wrong thanks to his complicated family dynamics. “His father's police chief, his brother's essentially the head criminal in the town basically as far as owning a chop shop operation. It leaves Curtis in this weird limbo. He loves his father and he loves his brother, but he's constantly pulled between, ‘Okay, this is wrong. I shouldn't do this. but also like this is necessary and I have to do this.’ I really enjoy being able to play that,” Shelton told me. “It adds another element as soon as he becomes friends with Marcel, Caitlyn, Zac because he starts to realize, even though he does something, it's going to have ramifications outside of him, outside of his life, and affect the people that care about him. Seeing him come to terms with that was one of my favorite moments of his in the show.”
Josh Macqueen takes on the role of the town’s rich bully Harris who has a lot bubbling under the surface. “[He’s] grappling with the notion of daddy's money and the privilege that comes with that ‘cause that doesn't get you the street cred that he so desperately needs,” shared Macqueen about his character’s place in the car racing scene. “Winning does. Being good does. Being the best does.”
The daddy issues continue for Marcel as well, played by Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem’s Nicolas Cantu. Despite his home life, “he still has this love for life,” said Cantu. “That's ultimately what Marcel is taught by his father: you can't let anything dim your shine. He's just going to be him and nobody's going to get in his way, not even his blood-related relatives.”
Meanwhile, Drake Rodger plays Curtis’ brother Ray, whose arc this season is really “more of a circle.” “He starts off as this bad guy and then, as the show goes, he realizes there might be a way out of this life. Then inevitably toward the end of the series, when some things fall through, he falls right back into the old patterns and he doubles down from where we got him in the beginning,” revealed Rodger. “So I feel like he's even worse where we leave him.”
Mia Healey plays the well-off Alicia who finds herself torn from the beginning of the season. “She's so conflicted in her heart and in her head. You really see her try and manage that conflict, while also making all the people in her life happy and being forgiving and being sensitive to other people's circumstances,” shared Healey. “But then she really does blossom in this way of rediscovering her independence and finding a lot of joy in herself.”
And it’s not just the teens who get in on the mystery of this season, as Nathalie Kelley, who plays Caitlyn and Zac’s mom Sam, reveals there’s much more to her than it seems. “She's trapped in this constant cycle of nostalgia and then, at the end, a deeper, bigger secret is revealed,” she told me. “The hardest part for me was waiting for that turn to come, but I think that's what makes it more exciting.”
While the actors didn’t necessarily do the insane car stunts in Motorheads, there was a lot of work done to make sure they looked like they knew what they were doing. “Our stunt guys did most of the stunt driving, but in preparation I went and I actually took a stunt driving course for three days in the desert. It's hard to fake driving if you don't know how to drive and it's harder to fake stunt driving if you don't know how to drive. I really wanted to understand the mechanics of it all,” said Rodger. “But yeah the driving for us ended right as you pulled up to the start line.”
“I was used to faking it in a way because I had just done a surf show,” shared Macqueen. “I don't really know how to surf. The confidence of paddling out and popping up is similar to the confidence of jumping in a car. You gain a familiarity and you gain a comfort being behind the wheel of these machines that are so powerful and so cool.”
Funny enough, Collazo is playing a character who is working on all these cars and doesn’t even have her license! “I do not even have my license, so it was probably the biggest challenge I've ever had as an actress yet. I relate to a lot of Caitlyn's spirit and personality. That I read and immediately understood, but like my big blind spot was cars. I don't know anything about cars,” she said, adding that she’d love to get her license and have Caitlyn become a racer in a potential season 2. “A lot of my learning and prep went into [this] two week crash course with the mechanics. I learned everything that I possibly could and then they were on set so I would just double check with them every day to make sure like, ‘Does this look like I'm holding it right?’ and things like that.”
Motorheads creator and executive producer Johnny Norris even took to X to tease a slight spoiler for us after Collazo’s confession. “If we're fortunate enough to get a season two (finger crossed), Caitlyn actually takes her driver's license test in the second episode (already written),” he wrote. “Hopefully by then Melissa will have hers.”
Meanwhile, Shelton shared that he was lucky enough to work in a buddy’s motorcycle shop during the pandemic, which really helped when it came to his mechanic knowledge. “Part of being a mechanic is always being on the journey to being better and I like that about it,” he said, revealing he even got to fix the motorcycle he rides on the show on set one day. “I actually fixed it on set because we were running out of time and they were like, ‘Why isn't the bike running?’ I worked with carburetors a lot, so I was able to pinpoint that we had a bad air mixture and fix that on the fly. I was really proud of that.”
His goal for a potential season two is to get a chance to help out more in the mechanic’s garage. “We had an entire department of some of the best guys in Canada building our machines for us. If you look at what they did with my bike, it's this CB550 from 1980 whatever. The gas tank is a fire extinguisher that's completely fabricated and the whole thing's custom. You look at Dottie in the show. Dottie's this Mad Max, roll caged out, up armored […] Civic. I know she’s got a V8 in her,” Shelton said. “They built such crazy stuff that it would have been way outside of our purview to build. I hope we get more of an opportunity to help them build it in season two. That would be really cool if they let us in the garage and gave us some access.”
In addition to car culture, the town of Ironwood becomes a character in its own right filled with house parties, festivals, and even homecoming. “Some of the most fun days was when we were all able to be together ‘cause I didn't do any of the stunt driving things. I love doing any of the scenes where we were at Alicia's house party or doing the ATV stuff. It was really fun all being together and braving some of the elements. When we first started filming, it was like dead winter, 6 inches of snow. It was out of control,” said Healey. She even got to film a scene with Michael Cimino on a ferris wheel at the town’s Firefly Festival that called to mind the iconic sequence in Love Victor. “That was so fun being on the ferris wheel. We just had a walkie-talkie on our laps and they would give us direction through the walkie-talkie. It was also raining like crazy and the ground there was just mud everywhere. It was actually a really insane couple days filming there.”
A memorable day for Cantu was filming Marcel getting the keys to his first car in the pilot episode. “We had this chance to film this scene at sundown and I remember it was Ryan Phillippe that was like, ‘Just wait for the sun to go down. We need this to happen at golden hour. It's super important to the scene.’ We waited and we did the scene and it was just like magic,” he shared. “I haven't seen it yet. I'm waiting for the premiere, but I've been told by a lot of people that it's such a great moment in the show and I'm just proud to be a part of it.”
“The prom episode,” said Shelton about his favorite scene to bring to life. “It was one of the coolest set decorations that I've ever seen. I love the way that all the storylines interconnect. lt's a junction for so many of those storylines colliding and it was a blast. It was just fun. I was homeschooled my whole life, so I never got to to do prom or homecoming or any of that. All my high school experience has been on set, so I got to have my own little prom there.”
Of course, what’s a teen drama without some romance? Shelton’s no stranger to a love triangle as Girl Meets World fans know all too well, but which was the more complicated one to be a part of? “Motorheads, for sure!” he exclaimed. “There's reasons for Curtis being with each woman and there's reasons for Curtis not being with each woman. I have no idea who he's going to end up with, by the way. I think that's part of the fun of it. Is it going to be Caitlyn? Is it going to be Brooke? Or Kiara's entire storyline. It's this giant ‘will they, won't they.’ I think Johnny's done such a wonderful job of making you appreciate each character, but also not giving away how it's going to end.”
Another highlight in the show? The music! “One of the more hidden aspects of the show is just how amazing the score is and the music is,” gushed Macqueen. “You have these amazing cars and these stories and these characters, but the Zach Bryan, Luke Combs, Olivia Rodrigo, Benson Boone… it’s just nonstop. It not only helps you tie into the youthfulness of the story, but also the nostalgia of the town. It's relevant but also classic, so there's something for everyone in here.”
The first season of Motorheads is streaming on Prime Video.
