The “Meg” star plays a character who keeps society (and bees!) safe in director David Ayer’s film.

Call it a buzzy role.

In the action movie The Beekeeper (out Jan. 12), Jason Statham plays a gentleman named Adam Clay who takes on a corrupt corporation, headed by Josh Hutcherson’s dastardly Derek Danforth, after a friend gets scammed by the company. Unfortunately for Danforth and his goons, Clay is a former “beekeeper,” a type of highly skilled secret agent (invented by screenwriter Kurt Wimmer) tasked with keeping the world safe by any means necessary. As director David Ayer elaborates, “The idea of The Beekeeper is that there’s this secret society that monitors what’s going on in our societies and then can step in and intervene when the system can’t take care of itself.”

But that’s not all you should know about a movie we at EW Towers have codenamed The Bee-qualizer. Turns out, the film’s metaphorical “beekeepers” are also actual beekeepers, the idea being that literally looking after hordes of winged honey producers will assist them in better protecting the metaphorical hive of humanity. As a result, Statham had to learn the art of the apiarist so he could convincingly depict a beekeeper during the movie’s initial sequence.

“In the opening, Jason’s pulling out the comb, and smoking the hive, and doing all the processes,” explains Ayer, whose previous directing credits include 2014’s Fury and 2016’s Suicide Squad. “That’s real. The bees are real. He learned how to do all of that. It’s interesting, because we see him as this rough punch-up guy, and yet he got the zen of it — he really embraced the zen of beekeeping.”

Did Statham get stung at all? Or did the bees know better than to waste their time trying to penetrate the presumably granite-like epidermis of the Crank and Expendables star?

“Jason did not get stung,” confirms Ayer. “I got stung a bunch of times because I was operating camera, getting all these tight shots of bees, the hero bee-shots, and I was wearing black socks. I learned that bees will attack black cloth because they think that it’s a bear. [Laughs] And so that’s why the beekeepers wear these white suits.”

Un-bee-lievable!

The cast of The Beekeeper also includes Jeremy Irons, Emmy Raver-Lampman, and Taylor James. The film swarms into theaters on Jan. 12.

Want more movie news? Sign up for Entertainment Weekly‘s free newsletter to get the latest trailers, celebrity interviews, film reviews, and more.