Over the weekend at the Calgary Expo,
Roseanne star, four-time Emmy winner, and Academy Award-nominated actress,
Laurie Metcalf was feeling the gratitude. Taking the stage with Collider’s
Perri Nemiroff, the actress spoke about her genre-crossing roles on stage and screen as well as which titles fans recognize her from that cause her the most surprise.
Of all the movies in her repertoire, Metcalf is thankful that she’s still receiving recognition for her role in 1997’s Scream 2, in which she played a news anchor named Debbie Salt who was secretly Nancy Loomis, the vengeance-driven mother of
Scream co-killer, Billy Loomis (
Skeet Ulrich). During their chat, Nemiroff asked Metcalf how she masterfully switched back and forth between characters and if either of the women changed drastically from her first reading.
“That was all on the page,” Metcalf explained,
praising writer and franchise creator, Kevin Williamson, for coming up with such a complex character. Walking the audience through her process as the performer, Metcalf said,
“I mean all I had to do was — I guess I just sort of, in my head, split her apart and Debbie Salt, I just played as a villain. And then Nancy, I played as a rabid mother avenging her son. They were very separate in my head… There was no overlap… If you’re good at playing the lunatic, you basically, as an actor, you have a free pass to be as crazy as you want to be.”
Giving Debbie Salt the old switcheroo and revealing at the last second that she’s in fact not a journalist at all but the mother of Billy Loomis was a twist that no one saw coming.
Metcalf is proud of the way things shook out for her, adding, “I think in the Scream movies, my character has the best reveal.” On a more heartfelt note, Metcalf also shared the fun fact that seeing Campbell and the rest of the
Scream family over the weekend at the Calgary Expo was the first time she had been in the same room as them since wrapping the production nearly 30 years ago.
Link:
Laurie Metcalf Thinks Her ‘Scream 2’ Killer Has the “Best Reveal”
Its awesome to hear that Laurie Metcalf thinks so highly of her Scream role all these years later. She's always been my personal favorite Ghostface killer for many reasons. I agree with her about her reveal. I did not see Billy's mother coming as a twist. I wish we got to see her reunion with the other Scream cast at the expo.
