VIDEO EXCLUSIVE: Harry Shum Reveals The Story Behind ‘Broadcast Signal Intrusion’

Harry Shum Jr. reveals the true story behind his new movie Broadcast Signal Intrusion in his new uInterview.

“It’s inspired by these intrusion hacks that happened in the late 80s basically at WGN,” Shum told uInterview founder Erik Meers, “basically a local station in the middle of their sports highlight, an intrusion happened where it was this weird guy in a mask that used incoherent speech patterns happening and then it went right back to the highlights. So this was a thing that FCC got involved, FBI got involved, you know, so we took a lot of that inspiration into the movie, but essentially it is about this man I play James, he’s a video archivist who transfers old footage onto DVDs and he happens to stumble upon one of these intrusions and over time he starts to realize that there might be a connection that’s a little more sinister that might connect him to his wife’s death. And he goes down this rabbit hole that might be the wrong rabbit hole to go down on.”

Shum explained that when the script was handed down to him, he didn’t know a lot about broadcast signal intrusions.

“I didn’t know too much about kind of the real events that it was inspired by or just in general outside of like hacks and I’d heard about the Max Headroom incident,” he said, “but reading the script it just — after reading it I just, it was just unsettling feeling that I couldn’t even really put into words how I felt about it. I just couldn’t stop thinking about it.”

Shum then spoke with the film’s director Jacob Gentry to get “a better understanding of what he was envisioning and how to take it a step further from, you know, the unsolved mystery of broadcast signal intrusions that really happened in the 80s, and focusing a little bit more of the character study.”

“I thought there was something really interesting, that I wanted to be involved in,” he said.

The actor reveals that his favorite scenes were with his “smart” and “inquisitive” co-star Kelley Mack.

“I think when she enters you get to know James a little more,” Shum said, “and I think at that point there’s a bar scene that we get to really, at least one of the few times, we actually had proper rehearsal to really figure things out physically and also given the space of how we were kind communicating to each other and that really helped inform kind of our characters more and give a little more information without actually saying it. And I really love those types of scenes and that was probably my favorite to work on because we got to both just really act.”

Broadcast Signal Intrusion is in theaters now.