Returning for the sequel to 2021’s The Black Phone, Madeleine McGraw cements her status as one of horrors most exciting new stars.
Black Phone 2 reunites director Scott Derrickson, screenwriter C. Robert Cargill, and stars Mason Thames and Madeleine McGraw for a another terrifying time taking on Ethan Hawke‘s creepy serial killer, the Grabber. But with the Grabber incontrovertibly dead at the end of The Black Phone, and sibling protagonists Finney (Thames) and Gwen (McGraw) now contending with the more mundane horrors of adolescence, things have changed in the four years since the last film. Emerging scream queen McGraw clues us in on the state of play on the Black Phone universe.
Travis Johnson: Where do we find you when we meet your characters again? Where are Gwen and Finney at when we come back into their lives?
Madeleine McGraw: In the first movie, it was more of a kids coming into teenagers sort of film. And now it’s these teenagers coming into young adulthood. We pick up with them four years later, and it’s interesting because you see how the trauma has shaped them and how it’s travelled with them throughout their lives. You get to see how they’re doing everything they can to not turn into these monsters by their experience with the Grabber. Finn is dealing with his PTSD. Gwen is dealing with these visions and she doesn’t know why she has them. She feels like an outsider. She feels like a freak. They’re trying to balance out a lot of chaotic things in their life while also trying to be normal teenagers with this traumatic event that happened to them.
Travis: Now with the first Black Phone, I didn’t think it lent itself to a sequel. I thought the ending was perfect, closed book, no notes, everyone’s out on a high. So satisfying.
Madeleine: Right!
Travis: So, I was a bit reticent: where do you go from here? What was your reaction when you learned the story and what path it was going to take?
Madeleine: When we did the first one. we learned fairly soon after that there was going to be a second movie, and I, of course, had your exact reaction. I was like, “Oh my God, how are they going to do that?” But now the focus is on Gwen. You get to learn more about these characters’ backstories, a little bit more about the Grabber. And I really do feel like it’s such a genius way to do a sequel. I feel like, especially for this franchise, I guess you could call it now. I feel like it’s the only way that you could have continued it in a smart way.
Travis: How do you think you’ve changed as an actor, as a performer, in between the first film and now?
Madeleine: I feel like I’ve changed a lot. I feel like I’ve grown a lot, for sure. I honestly feel like I learned a lot when filming Black Phone 2. I mean, obviously a lot of time had passed, so I definitely grew in a lot of different ways. But Black Phone 2 was a very big challenge for me as an actor. I feel like it definitely tested my abilities. I had an amazing experience getting to do all of it. I got to do a lot of things that I’ve never gotten to do before. I got scuba certified, which was really, really cool. I tell people all the time!
Travis: That does lead into another question I had. It looks like they really put you through the wringer on this one. You do a lot of physical performance. There are sequences where Gwen really just kind of gets bounced around. What was that like? What were you allowed to do?
Madeleine: Okay, so funny enough, Scott and Cargill [director Scott Derrickson and screenwriter C. Robert Cargill] know how much I love getting to do my own stunts because I talked to them so much about it in the first movie. They know my dream is to get to do an action movie where I get to just non-stop be doing my own stunts. So they wrote in a lot of stunts specifically for me to do because they knew how much I loved it. And they also told our stunt coordinator, Bronco, to let me do as many of my own stunts as I could do. There were two that I didn’t get to do, and it was the spinning ones, which I’m very glad that I didn’t get to do that, honestly, because I do get dizzy. But other than that, it was all me.
Travis: I love that everyone just calls him Cargill. Even his wife calls him Cargill. He might as well not have a first name, and he’s kind of got two.
Madeleine: Yeah, I know! I don’t know why. I’ve always referred to him as Cargill, so I don’t know. It’d be different for me to call him by his first name.
Travis: You’ve been called a scream queen. How do you feel about that?
Madeleine: I’m honoured that people are calling me that. I feel very, very flattered. I never thought that this would be the direction that my career would be going, because my parents would literally never let us watch horror movies when we were younger. I had to sneakily watch horror movies on airplanes and stuff. So I feel like the genre is definitely unexpected.
Travis: Okay, and finally: what’s up next for you? What can you talk about that you’ve got coming up?
Madeleine: I’m going to film and executive produce this coming of age thriller called SuperUnknown. It involves… actually don’t know what I can say about it! So I’m just going to leave it at that. But I am also really excited to shoot this because it’s quite different for me, or at least moving in a different direction genre wise. So I think it’s going to be a really cool experience and I can’t wait for to tell the world more about it.
Black Phone 2 is in cinemas now.
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