Cocaine Bear performer says he studied The Revenant bear and Baloo from Jungle Book

‘The challenge was trying to move as close as I could to how a bear would move,’ stunt performer Allan Henry said

The performer behind the titular bear in Cocaine Bear has revealed what research went into playing the drug-fuelled animal.

The newly-released film, which is based on a true story, follows a black bear in Chattahoochee National Forest, Georgia, that goes on a rampage after consuming vast quantities of lost cocaine.

New Zealand actor Allan Henry – who has played orcs in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit films and intelligent apes in Planet of the Apes – took on the role of “Cokie the Bear” as he was affectionately known on set.

In an interview with /Film, Henry spoke about his process for transforming into a 500-pound black bear.

“The challenge was trying to move as close as I could to how a bear would move, the pace that a bear would take, the way that a bear would breathe and explore the environment around them,” Henry said.

In order to prepare, the actor said he studied other famous bears in film. “Yeah, I looked at bears that have been in media, like the bear from The Revenant. I worked on The Jungle Book [2016] — at Wētā [the FX company behind Avatar], we did some stuff, so I looked at what we had done with Baloo for those sequences.

“But a lot of it was nature documentaries and CCTV footage and camera footage of people who were like, ‘There’s a bear in my backyard tearing up my car.’”

One of the film’s stars Alden Ehrenreich posted a photo of what Henry looked like on set on his Instagram.

In a previous interview with IndieWire, Allen explained that apart from motion capture, he served as a focal point for the actors who had to pretend there was an angry bear facing them.

“My second role was for the performers so that they had, you know, natural and organic timing and reactions and the influence and impetus from something being beside them,” he said.

In her four-star review for The Independent, Clarisse Loughrey wrote that the movie “lives up to its gloriously stupid title”.

“Cocaine Bear is... perfectly constructed to feel like the kind of cult horror movie you’d find on a dusty VHS tape somewhere in a stoner’s basement,” she wrote.

Cocaine Bear, directed by Elizabeth Banks, is out in cinemas now.