The story goes a little something like this:
Michigan-born/Santa Fe-made Tai Fletcher was simply working a bouncer shift at the sadly long-gone Paramount nightclub one evening in the year 2000 (said in Andy Richter voice) when rapper Master P caught a glimpse of him and asked him to play “a big scary white guy” for director John Luessenhop’s film Lockdown in which Master P also played a role. Fletcher had never considered working in film before—his life was one of MMA and UFC matches. Regardless, he took the dive and picked up his first screen credit, as well as his Screen Actors Guild card.
“I was just some kid from Michigan who ended up in Santa Fe,” he tells SFR. “I was just working as a bouncer at night to pay my bills.”
Alex De Vore
Since then, however, Fletcher has become a recognizable player in more films and television shows than we can count, including Jurassic World, that Jumanji reboot, John Wick, The Mandalorian, Breaking Bad and Gen V. He’s also the mind behind local gym Undisputed Fitness; a co-founder of Caveman Coffee (that’s a coffee compnay, btw) and, as of this week, a bonafide movie producer whose first-ever producing credit is attached to the just-released-to-streaming-services indie film Kill Me Again.
Not to be reductive, but the premise is a sort of horror/thriller hybrid that reads like Groundhog Day if it were a whole hell of a lot darker. In short, a serial killer known as the Midnight Mangler (Roswell alum Brendan Fehr) is thrust into the same day over and over again. And though he gets to do all the killing he wants within this setup, which seems pretty good for a murder-y type at first, our anti-hero eventually longs to escape the cycle. Kill Me Again was written and directed by Fletcher’s longtime colleague, friend and Caveman Coffee co-founder Keith Jardine, himself a former mixed martial artist and athletics enthusiast. The more interesting part of the production, however, is in how it almost didn’t happen—and how it came together.
According to Fletcher, Jardine came up in film in a similar fashion: when the scene called for a big, muscly type, Jardine would get the call. Over time, however, both he and Fletcher realized that while they loved being on set and performing, if they were ever going to take their film obsession and careers to the next level, they’d have to work out how to produce their own projects. Thus, their multimedia company Broken Ear Productions was born (a nod to the UFC world’s practically guaranteed cauliflower ear situation).
Jardine learned to write screenplays and produced numerous ideas. Fletcher, meanwhile, brought his 20-plus years of experience into the fray, with the pair ultimately deciding Kill Me Again was the film to make. Then came the 2023 WGA strike, delaying production. It wasn’t until late 2024 that production on their film began, and Fletcher says Kill Me Again was shot in a mere 12 nights in an Albuquerque restaurant with a New Mexico crew.
“The impetus is…it’s almost like Meow Wolf,” Fletcher says. “I remember [former CEO] Vince Kadlubek coming to [The Paramount’s Bar B] to spit poetry, and it later became that he and his buddies want to make art, but they run into a problem—they can’t get representation in Santa Fe, so what they did was to be proactive. That’s now a multimillion dollar company.”
The point being, he adds, that sometimes you have to do your own thing if you want to make a mark.
“Now more than ever, how do you plan your own party so you’re not waiting around for the phone to ring,” Fletcher queries. “Keith and I are well-suited for that in that we’re both rather stoic and principled. You have a game plan that’s designed for an end goal. As long as we all remember what we’re doing, there’s not room for much else.”
Fletcher plays a role in the film, too—that of Fry Cook, a literal fry cook in the weird repeating day’s restaurant locale.
“I kill some people,” he tells SFR with a laugh.
Find Kill Me Again almost anyplace you stream movies.
