Ex-MMA fighter Keith Jardine discusses his debut feature, ‘Kill Me Again’

“It’s ‘Groundhog Day,’ but from the perspective of a serial killer.”

That’s how the former MMA fighter Keith Jardine describes his feature-length directorial debut, “Kill Me Again,” which was shot entirely in Albuquerque.

The darkly humorous psychological thriller, which Jardine wrote, directed and acted in, opens in select theaters on Friday, Aug. 8.

“It’s super twisted and super fun,” Jardine said.

In the octagon, Jardine’s gritty, relentless fighting style earned him the nickname “The Dean of Mean.” But in person, the longtime Albuquerque resident revealed a sensitive side, opening up about his insecurities.

“I had impostor syndrome every night. At 5 or 6 p.m., whenever it was, getting out of the truck (to direct “Kill Me Again”) was the hardest part of the day,” Jardine said. “I’d be about to have a panic attack, and I’d have to tell myself, all right now, I gotta go pretend to be this thing. I’ve got these world-class actors that are hanging on my every word.”

Jardine already had one film under his belt – the 2022 short, “El Paso 11:55” — which won best film, best actor, best original story and best first time director at the Independent Shorts Awards. But directing a feature was an entirely different beast.

“At every phase of this movie, I was learning something different. I learned how to be a director, I learned how to work with a composer, I learned how to edit. I learned how to do all this stuff,” Jardine said. “I learned how to raise money and finance it. And now I’m learning how to get into theaters and approach distributors, and how to market my movie. It gets overwhelming.”

Between retiring from MMA fighting in 2012 and making his first short in 2022, Jardine spent 10 years as an actor.

“Transitioning from fighting to acting is tough. You have to reinvent yourself,” he said. “And you’re gonna spend all your money chasing this career and going to LA for auditions and all that. So the stunts, in the beginning, helped me bridge that gap.”

Jardine considers some of his early roles, including the henchman character Kuzma in “John Wick,” to be “stunt acting” work, which he took mainly to make ends meet while pursuing more serious character roles.

His break came in 2014, when he played the character Puck Beaverton in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Academy Award-nominated “Inherent Vice,” based on the eponymous Thomas Pynchon novel.

“That was when I first started taking it really seriously and saying, Hey, I trained for fighting. I need to train for acting,” Jardine said. “Because acting is way more competitive than fighting. Fighting is easy. You win, you get to the next level. You keep winning, they can’t ignore you. But with acting, they don’t give a s*** about you. They don’t give a s*** about what you did in the UFC and all that stuff. Like, you need to be a good actor — and better than all these people that trained their whole life at it — to go out and sell this role and be believable.”

To become a good actor, Jardine said he had to battle his own insecurities. And that began with acting classes.

“You’ve got to be willing to get in front of a bunch of people and make a fool of yourself,” Jardine said. “The main thing is actually performing in front of people you barely know, and swallowing your pride at people going home, saying, Oh, I saw Keith Jardine, and he did this role, and he was awful. He’s horrible. Just being able to do that and look stupid.”

Jardine has a small but significant role in “Kill Me Again.” The lead, Charlie, is played by Brendan Fehr, whom Jardine praises for somehow making an utterly unsympathetic character likeable.

“Brendan, who’s in pretty much every freaking scene, delivers something that’s really impossible,” Jardine said. “Like, I don’t want to give too much away, but it’s really diabolical and twisted, and he’s a really, really bad person. But you fall in love with him.”

Working closely with a small production team, Jardine was able to give the film the stylish, expressive look he wanted.

“Juergen Heinemann, my cinematographer — I’ll never work without him. He’s amazing. The first thing people see when they see this movie is that it’s beautiful,” he said.

Jardine closely supervised the post-production process, as well, working in the manner of an old-school auteur.

“I got my fingerprints on everything,” Jardine said. “I was with the editor (Vince Forcier) every step. Like, use this take. Use this word on this take … But man, he did a great job. Everything’s in the editing.”

Jardine said he has had to fight an uphill battle to be taken seriously, first as an actor and now as a director, but he thinks the film speaks for itself.

“Everybody who’s seen it — a lot of different distributors and professionals who have seen this movie — they’re just blown away,” Jardine said. “They say it’s not just good for an independent film. It’s good for anything. It’s a great film.”

“I think I’m way better at this than I ever was at fighting,” he added.

Ex-MMA fighter Keith Jardine discusses his debut feature, ‘Kill Me Again’