By SHAWN MACOMBER
As a child, Michele Dawson was always climbing on things.
“There’s this one picture of me that I absolutely love,” Dawson tells RUE MORGUE. “I must be around a year and a half old and I’m hanging off the back of this huge rocking chair in my parents living room, feet floating, just swinging myself as hard as I can back and forth.”
The older she got, the higher and more precarious her scaling became. “I’m kind of a petite person,” she says, “and for whatever reason I just always felt called to climb things rather than grab something to stand on.” Her parents saw the writing on the top of the walls and enrolled her in gymnastics, which soon became a huge part of her personality and foundation as an individual—even as she developed an interest in acting that would eventually overtake the tumbling.
In kindergarten Dawson won an award that allowed her to take a Saturday morning acting class with adults at Georgia State University—“Mostly I remember feeling shy and getting up the courage to take a snack,” she says—but she didn’t pursue it seriously until she arrived at college and dove headlong into as many performance classes as she could take, discovering her passion and calling along the way.
In 2022, however, these seemingly disparate elements of Dawson’s life suddenly came full circle.
And at the nexus where that circle was completed stood horror icon Michael Myers.
“Oh my gosh, I can’t even tell you how exciting it is for me to be in this film,” Dawson says of her role as the feisty, physical, and badass Nurse Deb in HALLOWEEN ENDS. “That I finally have a role where my acting dovetails with my gymnastics and acrobatics training literally makes my heart sing.”
It is, of course, very kind of Dawson’s blood-pumping ticker to take care of the singing when her mouth is so occupied with the screaming.
Indeed, for Dawson to find herself in one of the greatest horror franchises of all time is more than a bit unexpected—to herself more than anyone else perhaps.
“I’m a little bit of a scaredy cat,” Dawson admits. “When I was younger, we’d have these gymnastics team sleepovers and watch horror movies. I would get so scared. Things tend to stay in my head and affect me for a long time. So, I didn’t watch a whole lot of scary movies.”
To put it in the parlance of our cinematic times, however, that was just one timeline.
Fun fact: When Dawson auditioned for HALLOWEEN ENDS, not only did she not know what movie it was, she didn’t even know the genre. So, when she booked it, she jumped in and watched the original 1978 HALLOWEEN and…loved it. And then she dove into the previous David Gordon Green entries and earlier sequels.
“I was like, ‘Wait a minute…horror is fun,’” Dawson says. “Horror is exciting. It’s different and inventive. So, I started to develop a new love for the genre and as I did, I started realizing more and more how blessed I was to be part of this epic conclusion to one of the most iconic horror stories ever. I mean, this is the climax of four decades of Jamie Lee Curtis battling this monster in the same role—that’s unheard of. I feel extremely lucky. It’s an honor. Humbling, too.”
That the character also resonated so deeply with Dawson certainly didn’t hurt.
“Nurse Deb was so much fun to play,” she says. “She’s a bit unfiltered. She’s someone who likes to get what she wants, which makes her rather aggressive, which was a blast.”
Like many introverts, the outlet of an over-the-top extrovert character proved cathartic.
“It’s almost like the sides we’re too scared to show in real life come out twice as powerfully when you give us a character to channel those feelings through,” Dawson muses. “Then it’s like, ‘Oh, great…release. Now I get to be this other person and show these other facets of myself to the world.’”
One thing that struck Dawson arriving on a set run by the same crew that had worked on both HALLOWEEN 2018 and HALLOWEEN KILLS (2021) together was the welcoming family vibe. She quickly developed a strong bond with several cast members shooting during COVID on the outer edges of Savannah, Georgia. (She has a raincheck for a headstand contest with yogi director Green, for example.)
“There was a comradery that was important for breaking the tension between the more intense scenes,” Dawson says.
And what, pray tell, happens in those particularly intense scenes?
Dawson isn’t telling, but she’s willing to give a hint.
“I think whatever people think may happen is probably not gonna happen,” she says, laughing. “HALLOWEEN ENDS is full of surprises. I just can’t wait for people to see it.”
HALLOWEEN ENDS is playing in theaters now.
