His mom's in every date movie. Now, Jack Quaid stars in the anti-Valentine

Jack Quaid's latest movie Companion begins with a meet-cute at a supermarket. His Josh and Sophie Thatcher's Iris can't take their eyes off each other, causing a cloying mishap in the fruit aisle. It's a fascinating cold open, not just because it leans more satire than sincere, sending up the hoariest rom-com trope, but also because of the relationship Quaid has with that genre. It's practically written in his DNA.

The actor — most recognized for his starring role in The Boys as a sensitive tech store employee turned vigilante who pushes back against corrupt superheroes — happens to be the son of Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan. His mother, of When Harry Met Sally and You've Got Mail fame, is essentially the queen of the very genre most of us will be cycling through in the lead up to Valentine's Day.

"You can't talk about the genre without mentioning her," Quaid acknowledges, when I ask him what it means to see his own mom in some of the most essential date movies of all time. "I'm someone who's done a rom-com [2019's Plus One]. I really enjoy it."

Just hours before our interview, Ryan happened to share an Instagram post with Billy Crystal. She was teasing their When Harry Met Sally reunion in an upcoming Super Bowl commercial, guaranteeing they'll remain part of the conversation this Valentine season.

And so will her son. Only he's starring in something that could more accurately be described as an anti-Valentine.

Companion twists rom-com tropes into a comically sinister and gruesome thriller with a high body count, where the warm, gentle and kind-hearted demeanor Quaid showed off in The Boys is weaponized and unmasked. In Companion, Quaid's Josh is the entitled boyfriend who is revealed to be gaslighting Iris while showing no qualms about inflicting both emotional and physical harm on her, especially when she fights back.

Here's the thing …

(And at this point, I have to give a spoiler warning to anyone who hasn't seen Companion's full trailer and wants to discover the film's premise completely cold.)

… Iris is a sex bot, an AI creation whose emotional dependence is hard-wired into her programming. That makes Quaid's Josh the kind of millennial who finds an artificial companion more satisfying than the real thing — especially since he thinks he can dispose of the relationship when it gets inconvenient.

"He's a total asshole," says Quaid, though he's careful to point out that while shooting the movie, he wasn't trying to look at his character that way. "The challenge of playing a villain, in so many words, is [that] you don't really want to judge the character while you're playing it. Because that kind of takes you outside of it.… I had to find my way in and try to empathize with him. I think he's just selfish and a bit blind to that. He just feels like he never quite got what he wanted in life. He's a character who's very rarely heard the words 'I love you.' That's how I chose to play him. I think he has this delusion, like he's John Cusack in the '80s."

We're speaking in the bar area at a Cineplex in Toronto, where Quaid had just surprised the audience at a preview screening of Companion. He's in town working on The Boys' final season. He points out that he's been shooting outdoors, suffering from his first exposure to our ungodly polar vortexes. "I've been coming here for years," he says, sounding shaken, "and this is the coldest it's been."

He's not exactly dressed for the climate. He's wearing a blue jacket from the L.A. brand Deus Ex Machina — an unintended homage perhaps to the Alex Garland film Ex Machina, which, like Companion, is also about an AI femme bot? "Does that feel like a choice," Quaid asks. "Now, I gotta own it."

Ex Machina is just one of the many movies Companion nods to. The genre mishmash also references The Stepford Wives, Terminator 2, Rosemary's Baby and slasher movies. And then, of course, there's the rom-com, where so much of the toxic behaviour Josh exhibits wouldn't be out of place. Think of all those movies where women patiently wait for men who don't really deserve them to mature or commit. If you revisit When Harry Met Sally, for instance, take a good look at what a persistent, mansplaining asshole Harry can be, whether in his assessment of high-maintenance women or the often dismissive way he speaks of Sally's pursuits.

"If you really [think] about it, these characters are acting kind of selfishly," says Quaid. He's not speaking specifically of When Harry Met Sally, but rather how those tendencies recur throughout the genre. "[The men] don't really need to grow or change or anything like that. The better movies kind of make a comment on that.

"What I loved about [Companion] was, we are flipping all that on its head.… [Josh] thinks he's a romantic and that he's not like all the other dudes, when in fact, he absolutely is — if not worse…. He's maybe the most insecure character I've ever played. And that insecurity becomes dangerous."

Quaid also took a moment to consider the way Companion speaks to contemporary anxieties over AI, a sticking point during the Hollywood strikes that cut right in the middle of the movie's production. Through Iris (who is so brilliantly played by Yellowjackets star, Thatcher), the film keeps up a tradition of killer robots we sympathize with — like in Blade Runner or Ex Machina — even as the fear of technology is more intense than ever before.

"I remember being really afraid that somehow this movie wouldn't come out in time," says Quaid. "Like this movie and our real world would be the same. Elon Musk has these Tesla robots coming out. The robot partner — it exists. You have AI chatbots that people can interact with and have a relationship with. The future is here. And that's the scary thing about the movie: More than anything else I've ever really done, this feels the most plausible."

Companion opens in theatres Friday, Jan. 31.