Interview: Secret Cinema's Matt Costain on Grease: The Immersive Movie Musical
- Immersive Rumours
- Jun 11
- 9 min read
Updated: Jun 25
We sit down with Secret Cinema's Senior Creative Director, Matt Costain, to discuss their much-anticipated return to London with Grease: The Immersive Movie Musical.
Image: Secret Cinema
It's been nearly three years since a large-scale Secret Cinema show opened in London. This summer, the company, which are known for creating immersive adaptations of popular films such as Star Wars, Guardians of the Galaxy and Back to the Future, makes its return to the capital with Grease: The Immersive Movie Musical, which will see the debut of a new format for the company.
With a cast of 30, a live band, and recreations of many of the film's locations, including Frosty's Palace, The Autoshop, and Rydell High, this version of Grease is a radical departure from previous Secret Cinema productions of the film, with the action taking place alongside the film's screening.
Ahead of the show's launch, we were invited down to Battersea for a sneak peek at what to expect from Secret Cinema's return and spoke to the show's Creative Director, Matt Costain. In our frank conversation, Matt discusses what Secret Cinema has been working on since their latest production, how their previous business model presented some unique challenges, and how the company is adapting to fit into the rapidly evolving immersive landscape.
Immersive Rumours: Hi Matt, thanks for speaking with us today. Do you mind introducing yourself and telling us a bit about your role within Secret Cinema?
Matt Costain: I'm Matt Costain. I'm the Senior Creator Director for Secret Cinema, and I've been with the company on and off since the very, very early days when Fabien Riggall first started it. He was about two or three shows in and asked me to come and work with the actors and the creation of the performance. Back in the day, when we were doing one-nighters, we didn't really ask anyone's permission for anything. We ran in, did a thing, and by the time anyone was worried about it, we'd gone.
I stayed with Secret Cinema through the first couple phases of it growing up, and we did a lot of growing up in public back then. I ended up doing about ten shows up until The Empire Strikes Back, which was, I suppose, the pinnacle of the sort of thing we did in found spaces. After that, I needed a rest and a change. Secret Cinema grew a lot over the next few years while I wasn't around, but I then came back, refreshed and excited for Stranger Things, and have been with the company full-time ever since.
Image: Dale Croft
IR: Grease: The Immersive Movie Musical is the first large-scale Secret Cinema in London since 2022, and it’s been two years since the previous iteration of Grease at the NEC in Birmingham. What has the last couple of years looked like for the business? From the outside, it’s looked pretty quiet, but I'm sure there's been a lot going on behind the scenes.
Matt: We’ve been extremely busy trying to make the next thing happen. This is the smallest violin in the world playing for the producers, but it turns out that putting on immersive shows is hard.
IR: Who knew!?
Matt: Who knew! All immersive companies will tell you the same thing. At Secret Cinema, we’re at the mercy of the studios, and sometimes we'll be quite a long way down developing a project, then, for some reason outside of our control, it stops. Also, the world has changed. The nature of immersive has changed. The word immersive has changed. Immersive means so many things now to so many people. We’ve been trying to work out what our place in that space is and create a sustainable business. So that's been happening behind the scenes - a bit of existential soul searching, along with some business modelling.
With the best love in the world, the early Secret Cinemas were unsustainable. We've always wanted it to be accessible to people; it can't just be a playground and a hobby for rich kids. It needs to be able to support the industry on which it depends, and the audience on which it also depends. We’ve been trying to find a new way of delivering the stories, but also, post-COVID, people were booking tickets in a different way.
IR: How so?
Matt: When we were looking at it, people were only really booking one big thing a year, far in advance. They would book Glastonbury, or Wimbledon, or get World Cup tickets, or insert favourite theatre show/ event here, and then book other things, like Secret Cinema, later. They wanted to see how their bank balances looked, or they would want to make sure it wasn't going to get cancelled, and that's a precarious model.
Bearing all that in mind, and the expectation of these huge shows, means that if you're not careful, you get to the stage, which we nearly did, where the only thing you can consider doing is giant blockbusters. Everything else crumbles under the weight of the expected ticket sales and the costs.
We had a lot of conversations with studios about how we could deliver films in a way that wouldn't be to their existing expectations, which was, to quote another company, creating Sleep No More for everything. It took a while for them to come around to that idea, but now we’re at a point where there are 5 or 6 projects stacked, waiting for the right combination of things to fall into place. If they do fall into place, we’ve got material for 3-4 years, and a number of shows a year, but it has taken two years of apparent inertia for that to happen.
I know it’s frustrating looking in from the outside, going ‘When are you ever going to do something again?’ or if you read through the comments, it’s ‘When are you going to do a brand news show?’, with the next comment being ‘When are you going to bring back Star Wars?!’. Everyone has an opinion on how to be doing Secret Cinema, but we’ve been working hard, and it’s hard to communicate that. We thought it was best to keep quiet until we can put our money where our mouth is and come out with the three-year deal at Evolution, and Grease as the first step on this idea to a new way of producing work, with hopefully many more to come.
Image: Dale Croft
IR: The new format you’re adopting for Grease: The Immersive Movie Musical, is this going to largely be what Secret Cinema shows look like going forward? Are we done with the days of tight corridors and secret rooms that you've got to earn entry into?
Matt: There will always be secrets.
IR: It’s in the name, isn’t it…
Matt: It's on the tin. There will always be things to find. Back in the day, we didn't even tell you what you were going to go and see. Our secrets - the way that we do things, and the way you can find something - have changed, but haven't stopped.
One thing we are looking at is being flexible to the different titles that deserve different formats. There are some titles that you think, ‘Yeah, I get that. I'm on a mission. There’s a time pressure. It's important. I can do that.’ Other ones feel like you want to sit in the world. Grease represents the beginning of an idea for how to look at those titles. The film is unfolding around you, but the exploration takes place in and around the film showing.
IR: As opposed to being two distinct halves..
Matt: Yeah. We've sort of been calling it the ‘one world model’. We have to be quite disciplined with ourselves because, as you said, we started with going, ‘Let's show this film in a place that's appropriate, so let's find a hospital that has 50 rooms'. The problem there was always, where do you find the big room to do the screening, or the finale, or what we call the hero moment?
The next idea was to get a warehouse with a big space for the screening and the finale, but we're going to have to build those 50 rooms. Anybody who's involved in theatre or construction will tell you that building 50 rooms is an unsustainable business model.
We then said to ourselves, ‘Okay, what if you're not building so many rooms but you're looking at one large space?'. We've all done the show where we've been in one large space and we've pretended there are separate rooms, which is just a lot of shouting. It's not satisfying, so then we started saying, ‘Okay, if we're going to be in one big room largely, we'll own up to it’.
Let's help direct the main body of attention in the audience, so it follows a more theatrical path. Around that, we offer pauses, gaps and areas where you can go off and explore. That's where you have to be careful, because if you're not careful, you'll go, ‘Oh, just put a one-on-one there. Oh, just put a little room there', and before you know it, you've gone back to building 50 rooms.
Image: Dale Croft
IR: For Grease, you've got some new ticket types, including the VIP Immersive ticket, which allows guests to arrive 75 minutes before, learn a routine and be on stage at points as well. Is that a reflection of the understanding that different audience members are looking for different levels of engagement?
Matt: Absolutely. We've always allowed that to happen organically. We've always had super fans, people like PPSC (Positive People of Secret Cinema), who are wonderful and want to find every secret, get involved, do all that homework, and learn all the songs. We want to facilitate that type of stuff.
There are also people who are fans of this particular title, whatever it may be, who want to see the iconic thing for that title, and then there are, broadly, people who go, ‘I don't know why I'm here. My partner has bought me a ticket. I saw that it looked fun. I saw a poster and heard it's cool.’ For those people, we offer spectacle and gradual invitations to join.
While we've tried to keep it accessible to people in lots of different ways, not everybody wants to do those things. We've found that some of that is a barrier to entry. Not everybody wants to dress up, and some people will find it off-putting. However, it's helpful for the world if it feels like the right world, so we encourage you to, and we offer people a light touch these days on how you might gently join in, rather than being as we were in the beginning, which was, ‘You must! You have to! There is no excuse for not dressing in one of nine elaborate costume types and entering carrying a cabbage!'.
We're trying to be lighter, but we know that people want to do these things, so there will always be the opportunity for anybody who’s got a general admission ticket to join in anyhow. I would hate for Secret Cinema to become exclusive to the extent where it’s ‘Sorry you can't do that.’ It should always be the case that you can.
For those people who know they really want to, it offers an inside, backstage track. You can get a VIP ticket, which means coming down early, learning some things so that you can join in, so that you can be in the front row and maybe be a choreography ambassador almost, where you can be passing on what you do, and being like team leaders, if that interests you.
At the other end of the scale, there are some people who just want to sit and watch, so we've got this Roam and Return seated ticket. You've got your table, you've got your seat, you can go back to it - it's yours - but you can get up at any time and wander off and join a bit that you feel like.
Image: Dale Croft
IR: Finally, what advice would you give for someone who has never been to a Secret Cinema show before, maybe has never done any immersive stuff, but is looking to come to Grease: The Immersive Movie Musical this summer?
Matt: You know what? The first thing I'd say is relax. You get out what you put in, but that doesn't mean that you have to go crazy. If you want a relaxed time, you can relax. We're not going to make you do anything you don't want to do. We're not going to embarrass or humiliate you.
If you want to dress up, however gently, you will probably feel more at home when you are there, rather than going 'Oh, I wish I had’. Be a little bit brave, take a little bit of a risk. There's something really, really pleasing and really rewarding about getting on the tube wherever it is that you live, as the only person in a black leather jacket and sunglasses. Gradually, as you get nearer the venue, you’ll get other high school students and teachers and people in other outfits getting on. You think, ‘Oh, you're going where I'm going’, and by the time you get to the destination station, there are throngs of people walking up the drive to Evolution in outfits. That's a really powerful feeling that sets you up really well.
Image: Dale Croft
Grease: The Immersive Movie Musical will run from 1st August to 7th September 2025 at Evolution London in Battersea Park. For more info and to get tickets, visit greasetheimmersivemoviemusical.com
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