You thought losing your luggage was the worst thing that could happen at the airport? Taron Egerton begs to differ. The Rocketman and Kingsman star has taken on his next assignment: Carry-On. In the new thriller, Egerton plays Ethan Kopek, a TSA agent who’s blackmailed by a mysterious traveler (Jason Bateman), inducing perhaps the most airport anxiety ever. 

Carry-On director Jaume Collet-Serra specializes in this kind of one-location thriller; he previously directed Non-Stop and The Commuter, in which Liam Neeson faces bad guys on a plane and a train, respectively. “Contained environments force us to get to know the movie’s characters very quickly and personally — we’re immediately in the thick of the story with them, which creates a genuine investment in what’s happening on-screen,” Collet-Serra tells Tudum. “It’s also a very exciting visual challenge as a filmmaker to come up with creative ways to shoot every inch of a small space and try to make it look different and find new details of the world in each scene.”

The film marks the first collaboration between Netflix and Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Partners, a partnership that was announced in 2021. 

Read on for your Carry-On boarding information.

What is Carry-On about?

Written by T.J. Fixman (the Ratchet & Clank video games), Carry-On follows young TSA agent Ethan (Egerton) as he fights to outsmart a mysterious traveler who blackmails him into letting a dangerous package slip onto a Christmas Eve flight.

Egerton, best known for his turn as dashing Secret Service recruit Gary “Eggsy” Unwin in the Kingsman franchise and his remarkable transformation into rock legend Elton John in Rocketman, was eager to drop the flash and slip into a more relatable character.

The high-stakes circumstances come courtesy of Jason Bateman’s sinister villain, whom Ethan initially meets as a voice through headphones that threatens his pregnant girlfriend (Sofia Carson) if he doesn’t comply with instructions.

For Collet-Serra, Egerton and Bateman were a match made in heaven. “We all wanted this to feel incredibly realistic, like the events of this movie could happen to any of us on any given day at any airport, and Jason and Taron delivered brilliant performances that helped ground our movie and make it feel real,” Collet-Serra tells Tudum. “I think they also very much enjoyed the cat-and-mouse game between their two characters and really had a great time making a meal out of those moments.”

When will Carry-On be on Netflix?

Carry-On is now streaming on Netflix.

Can I see a Carry-On trailer?

Yes! Check it out at the top of this article. The trailer gives us a glimpse at the stakes — and scale — of the film, from a tense phone conversation on the airport security line to an explosive car crash. “One bag for one life,” Bateman’s voice offers Egerton’s Ethan. It’s an offer he’ll be hard-pressed to refuse.

Who’s in the cast of Carry-On?

Carry-On stars:

• Taron Egerton (Rocketman, Kingsman: The Secret Service)
• Jason Bateman (Ozark, Arrested Development)
• Sofia Carson (Purple Hearts, the upcoming The Life List)
• Danielle Deadwyler (The Harder They Fall, the upcoming The Piano Lesson)
• Sinqua Walls (Friday Night Lights, White Men Can’t Jump)
• Logan Marshall-Green (Lou, Upgrade)
• Theo Rossi (Emily the Criminal, The Penguin)
• Josh Brener (Old Dads, Silicon Valley)
• Dean Norris (Breaking Bad, Unfrosted)
• Tonatiuh (Angelyne, Promised Land)
• Curtiss Cook (West Side Story, The Devil You Know)
• Joe Williamson (Ford v Ferrari, Lucy in the Sky)
• Gil Perez-Abraham (The Batman, Killer Among Us)

“When Jaume first approached me about the role, I told him I didn’t want to do something that felt like an archetypal action hero,” Egerton told Netflix. “Luckily, neither of us thought that’s what was exciting or interesting about Ethan. What we kept our eyes on was making sure that we made him feel as relatable and as normal as possible … whatever normal is in the extraordinary situation he’s in.”

That everyman status extended to the film’s villain as well. “I don’t get a chance to play a bad guy that often,” Bateman told Netflix. “But Traveler isn’t really the petting-the-white-cat, twirling-the-mustache kind of bad guy. He’s a little more like you and me: He’s got a job to do, and he’s going to find a way to do it. That was my approach to it.”

Likewise, Sofia Carson was thrilled at the opportunity to bring new life to a familiar character: Ethan’s girlfriend, Nora, whose life is in jeopardy. “Nora stood out to me from the  moment I started reading Carry-On,” Carson told Netflix. “I loved that it was an action-thriller, but our leading lady was never a damsel in distress. She’s this confident, fearless, brave young woman, and I was drawn to her self-assurance and fearlessness to go after everything that she wants in life.”

Where was Carry-On filmed?

Carry-On is set in Los Angeles International Airport, but the production was filmed in New Orleans. “We were incredibly fortunate to use a retired airport as our set,” Collet-Serra told Netflix. “We took over the old MSY [Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport] in New Orleans and redesigned/decorated it to look like LAX. It was such a thrill to have the whole space at our disposal and be able to explore all these areas of an airport that we don’t normally get to see as passengers.”

The confined environment also presented a challenge for Collet-Serra and his crew. “Our story in particular has a long section where we stay with Ethan at his post running a TSA bag scanner, so he’s sitting in a chair staring at a screen with very little space to move,” Collet-Serra said. “This was certainly a challenge to shoot, but it also really helped us create the tension and claustrophobia that Ethan feels as he’s taunted by Traveler and can’t leave his little bubble. We used some really interesting camera rigs, lenses, reflections, and distortions to make the same space look very different from shot to shot.”

Did Carry-On have a TSA adviser for accuracy? 

Below sources are not current TSA officials.

Yes! The Carry-On cast had help keeping the film’s airport dynamic realistic. “We had two amazing LAX TSA advisers on this movie who gave us so much great information on anything we needed,” Collet-Serra told Netflix. “They put our actors through proper TSA training before we shot the movie, and they were on set to advise us if anything didn’t look realistic.”

Even the film’s most outlandish moments were fact-checked by airport experts. “In our movie, we have a very funny ‘contraband bingo’ game where all the TSA agents compete to find certain objects in bags throughout the day,” Collet-Serra said. “Our TSA advisers confirmed they had seen all of these items in bags before!”

One of the advisers on the film was Dr. Erroll G. Southers, a counterterrorism expert and the former chief of Homeland Security and Intelligence for the Los Angeles World Airports Police Department (the nation’s largest airport police department). Southers was appointed to serve as the deputy director of the California Office of Homeland Security by a politician who in another life wouldn’t have been out of place playing Egerton’s role in Carry-On — former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. 

For Carry-On, Southers weighed in on TSA vocabulary, the places where an agent like Ethan would be allowed to go within an airport, and the complicated relationship between airport police, local police, and federal agents. “I was a technical adviserthat was brought on for situational accuracy as it related to the agencies that are at an airport,” Southers told Netflix. “So that when [the actors] were saying things, they were realistic and authentic.” 

It’s a job that Southers took seriously, because you never know who might be watching. “In California, you’ve got to go through a course to be an airport police officer that’s separate from the course to be a police officer,” Southers said. “So it’s very unique … I think if you can portray that in a film like this one, it becomes even more real, because a person like me watching will say, ‘Wow. They really did their homework.’ ”

You can see a clip from Carry-On that spotlights the work of the TSA above.

Is Carry-On a Christmas movie?

Yes — like Die Hard, Carry-On is a Christmas movie. “My hope is that Carry-On can be enjoyed all year round as a fun, popcorn thriller,” Collet-Serra says. “But of course, the holiday travel theme is integral to our story, and we definitely had fun with it in terms of Christmas decorations in the airport and some classic holiday tunes in the soundtrack.”

Carry-On Teaser

Additional reporting by Liz Lee.