The best way to celebrate this spooky holiday season is by marathoning the genre-defining horror flicks of yesteryear—or, in the case of writer-director David Gordon Green’s “Halloween,” a 2018 take on Oct. 31’s titular horror classic. The long-in-the-making sequel again stars Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode; she’s joined this time by relative newcomer Andi Matichak as her onscreen granddaughter, Allyson, who gets swept up in Strode’s final confrontation with infamous masked killer Michael Myers. Matichak came by Backstage HQ Oct. 2 to discuss her big-screen breakout, vocal health, and why she loves script work.
READ: How to Get Cast in a Horror Film
Laurie’s attack 40 years prior has trickle effects on Allyson and others.
“We pick up 40 years [to] the day from the original movie. [Laurie Strode] was an 18-year-old girl who survived this immense trauma of Michael Myers murdering a ton of her friends, and she narrowly escapes. So now pick up 40 years later, and you see where she landed. I really personally love [it], just because you see the trickle effect from that incident and how it affects not only Laurie Strode, but Karen Strode, her daughter [played by Judy Greer], and then myself, her granddaughter.”
Matichak’s prep process is all about script work.
“I had booked it in September—it was a little bit over a year ago, and we didn’t start filming until January. I called one of my mentors in the industry, who’s my wonderful acting coach. He was like, ‘OK, put [the script] in a drawer, and we’re gonna pull it out in December and really start looking at it.’ So that’s what we did. I took a breath and just let things kind of settle and fall. The prep I do a lot as an actor is really just reading the script 100 times over. I read the script so many times because I think that story is the most important thing in what we’re doing.”
She learned how to scream safely.
“I have worked with a vocal coach because I have a lower-register voice. My voice is a little raspy; it’s prone to being lost pretty easily. That was something I was aware of going in, so I was doing everything I could with the steam, and then I was doing my vocal warm-ups, making sure that I was always fresh and felt good. On set, we usually only did one or two takes where I would go for it and scream, [but] I took a lot of precautions just to make sure [I stayed healthy]. A lot of tea with honey and lozenges.”
#MeToo and Time’s Up informed her acting in “Halloween.”
“[Everything in the current climate] is all relevant, and everything that any actor has gone through informs our work in some way, shape, or form, so all those feelings and all of those experiences are there and they will inform you.”
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