A man has been living inside a billboard above Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood since Thursday, turning a Netflix promo for The Last House Cast into a street-level spectacle that drew people to Sunset Boulevard and Selma Avenue on Friday morning.
The setup looked less like an ad than an apartment suspended 30 feet in the air. Inside were a bookshelf, plants, a coffee table, an armchair, a desk chair and paintings on the walls, all framed by thick red curtains and blue shutters marked with the line, “How long can you survive?”
The timing mattered because The Last House premiered on Netflix on Friday, and the billboard was built to keep the film in view at the same moment it reached viewers. Directed by Louis Leterrier and starring Greta Lee and Wagner Moura, the film follows a family of four trapped inside their home with dwindling resources and a mysterious threat, which made the billboard’s living-room illusion fit the premise almost too neatly.
Jon Bruno, who lives a couple of blocks away and has lived in Los Angeles for 30 years, said the display was already circulating online before he came out to see it. He said friends were sending videos and that he wanted to get higher so he could see inside, because from the street below he could not make out everything that was happening. He also said he had seen clips of the man moving around in a bathrobe and wondered aloud whether there was air conditioning up there, or even a bathroom.
That is where the stunt stopped feeling perfectly polished. The man inside had a fully furnished, air-conditioned living room around him, wore blue pajama pants and a bathrobe, waved at people below while holding a coffee mug and sometimes looked out through binoculars, yet a message on the whiteboard he carried read, “I’m stuck,”. The message made the display feel less like an invitation than a confinement, which is exactly the sort of contradiction that kept spectators in West Hollywood staring up at it.
The billboard and the man inside it were designed to promote The Last House, and the occupation along the Sunset Strip was expected to end Saturday. The unanswered question is not whether the stunt worked — it clearly did — but who the man is, and whether the final day brings a simple shutdown of the set or one last reveal before the billboard goes dark.
