Madelaine Petsch, who is also an executive producer, and Froy Gutierrez star as Maya and Ryan in The Strangers: Chapter 1, which is the first part of the three-chapter saga. You can experience the film in theaters on May 17.
After their car breaks down in an eerie small town, a young couple (Madelaine Petsch and Froy Gutierrez) are forced to spend the night in a remote cabin. Panic ensues as they are terrorized by three masked strangers who strike with no mercy and seemingly no motive in THE STRANGERS ― CHAPTER 1, the chilling first entry of this upcoming horror feature film series.
“I think trust was a really big piece for me. I felt like I really could trust the filmmakers, and that they gave me a voice at the table was very appreciated. So I think to me, as long as I could trust the people that were at the helm of this, I was able to be as vulnerable and try as many things as I needed to as an actor and an artist,” Petsch explained. “[Froy] was such a vulnerable and amazing scene partner, who really was present and gave everything, every take. So it was very easy to stay in the moment and I loved being able to work with him, because by the time he came to shoot movie one, I’d already shot like half of movie two and a little bit of movie three, and I’d been alone forever. So I was like, ‘Yes, a person! This is so nice.’ I was like, ‘This is amazing! Tell me more, what is it like out in the real world?’”
“The scene on the porch was our first scene and so, we were just like, ‘Okay, what does this relationship look like? How long have they been together? What arguments do they have that keep coming back up? Who takes care of what in the house? Who do they gossip about when they leave a party?’ We were just thinking about all the kind of minutia of being in a couple in a relationship like this,” Gutierrez shared. “For me, what really grounded the horror elements was just thinking, Ryan doesn’t think he’s in a horror movie, he thinks he’s on the Titanic and Maya is his Rose, and he just wants to make sure that she’s safe and he wants to get her out of there. And so, he thinks he’s in an action, he thinks he’s in a romance. That was the whole — that was my arc. That’s what I was focusing on.”
I spoke with the duo about how they approached these vulnerable roles, if any of their past characters would survive The Strangers, and which moments made them feel like they were really in a horror movie.
Watch my interview here:
