For Terry Knickerbocker, the call came in the dead of night.

It was Sam Rockwell, his longtime friend and client. Knickerbocker, a renowned acting coach based in New York, has worked with Rockwell on every gig since the early 1990s, helping Rockwell find the shades and contours of everyone from Chuck Barris to Bob Fosse.

So close are the two, Rockwell served as best man at Knickerbocker’s wedding and thanked Knickerbocker by name when he accepted his 2018 Oscar for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

Rockwell, 56, was calling from South Africa, where for months he had been working on a grueling shoot for Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, a sci-fi feature also starring Juno Temple from director Gore Verbinski. The film requires him to recite a 10-page monologue.

“We worked on that monologue for months just to hit all the points,” Knickerbocker, 69, says.

But it was not that movie that he was calling about.