By MICHAEL GINGOLD
READY OR NOT 2: HERE I COME, now in release from Searchlight Pictures (see review here), brings back Samara Weaving as Grace MacCaullay for another, bigger survival challenge, pairs her with FREAKY’s Kathryn Newton as her sister Faith and surrounds them with genre favorites including Sarah Michelle Gellar, Elijah Wood and David Cronenberg. RUE MORGUE got the chance to chat with all of the above, save Cronenberg.
Working with the legendary Canadian filmmaker was a highlight for Gellar and Wood, respectively playing Ursula, daughter of Cronenberg’s High Council member Chester Danforth, and the lawyer who lays out and maintains the rules of the deadly “game.” “I was really intimidated, initially,” Wood admits about working with Cronenberg, “because he’s a legend. I was nervous before meeting him and spending time with him, and then very quickly realized that he was happy to talk about his work and his career. He was kind of an open book in that way. It was lovely.”
“Whatever intimidation I think anyone might have had,” Gellar recalls, “he just put you at such ease instantly, and answered any questions we wanted to ask him. You know, you don’t know when you’re going to have another couple of hours with David Cronenberg, so you want to ask all the questions, and he was such a willing participant.”
Gellar and Wood may both be best known for their heroic roles in BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER and the LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy, but they’ve also explored the villainous side in the likes of MANIAC and CRUEL INTENTIONS. And they both enjoyed the chance to serve the Prince of Darkness himself in HERE I COME. “Elijah and I always say it’s cool to be the heel,” Gellar remarks, “and be able to have the fun that comes with those kinds of roles. It’s not always fun to be the good guy.”
“Totally,” Wood seconds. “You know, getting to be on the dark side, there’s just a little bit more deliciousness.”
As the targets of that villainy, Weaving and Newton also had a blast. Although HERE I COME marks Newton’s entrée into the READY OR NOT universe, she had previously acted for directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett on ABIGAIL (and in fact, as they revealed here, that collaboration inspired this sequel). “I was so excited to be asked to come into this universe because I love Matt and Tyler,” she says. “I was afraid that maybe Sam wouldn’t like me, but she did, so that was good [laughs], and I was just thrilled because I really believe in the fan base and they love these movies for a reason. READY OR NOT was a big hit, and I was just like, ‘OK, how can I make it better? How do I add to the movie? How do I make the fans more excited?’ I hope I did that, and I hope they love the movie, because it’s my favorite film I’ve ever done.”
Weaving, who was an executive producer on READY OR NOT 2: HERE I COME, also felt the weight of expectations in following up the popular original. “We felt the pressure of making a sequel and the fact that we had to nail it,” she says. “So all of us were truly dedicated to making sure the script [by fellow returnees Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy] was in the right place, that we cast it the right way and that we could get all the pieces to where they needed to be. Hopefully, it makes the audiences happy.”
Grace and Faith are literally connected by a pair of handcuffs for part of the movie, which wasn’t as much of a tough time as one might expect. “I had too much fun with that,” Newton recalls, and Weaving adds, “We were very silly. It led to a lot of comedic nonsense. And they quickly switched us to rubber handcuffs because the metal ones were quite…we got banged up, didn’t we?”
“Yeah,” Newton continues, “but it was nice because no one thought it was weird that I was with Sam all the time. I had to be. And then I slowly morphed into who she was and wanted to be like her. It made it easy to play her sister, you know? Because I was always around her.”
“Kathryn wants to be handcuffed to me all the time!” Weaving laughs, and Newton replies, “I would. You would too!”
Somewhat more grueling were the repeated, heavy splatterings of fake blood that they both went through over the course of the HERE I COME shoot. “It was uncomfortable, man!” Weaving says. “But, you know, you read the script and say, ‘OK, I’m not going to complain. I know what I’m doing. This is the job.’ And the makeup artists and prosthetics and effects guys were just incredible at keeping it real—10 out of 10.”
Gellar and Wood didn’t get the drenching in red their co-stars did, and the latter says, “I got to observe it. And having loved that device in the first film—the exploding bodies of blood—it was fun being able to see them update that, because they now have these blood cannons that are far more efficient in how they project the blood. I love horror movies, so getting to see that stuff play out, even if I wasn’t getting doused, was great.”
“But it didn’t matter whether you were in the scene or not; you were getting blood on you,” Gellar notes. “Every crew member at the end of the night—it was on their shoes, it was anywhere you sat. I mean, it was everywhere.”
However, the two agree that their most difficult moments on set involved neither physical stress nor sticky fake plasma. “My most challenging scene was the same as his most challenging scene,” Gellar says, “but for totally different reasons. [Wood laughs] His most challenging scene was explaining the rules of the game, because this poor gentleman had about 12 pages of straight monologue. For the rest of us, we all had about two lines each. And nobody wanted to mess their two lines up, because then Elijah would have to do all his dialogue again. So it was equally hard for everybody in that scene!”
“It was funny,” Wood adds. “When you are the person tasked with the one line, you have to know just when to come in, and if you don’t… There was a lot of pressure.
“We all were fans of the first film,” Wood says of himself and his fellow newcomers to the READY OR NOT team. “Loved that movie. It’s a total blast. And we’re so stoked at the way HERE I COME takes what was done in the original, deepens the narrative and widens the scope of the storytelling. We all felt like we were coming to the party to express a whole new aspect of the storytelling for something we were fans of.”
