#SDCC14 Exclusive: Danielle Harris, Kaj-Erik Erikson, and The Soska Sisters Talk See No Evil 2
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WWE Studios is resurrecting the demon Kane as Jacob Goodnight in See No Evil 2, the upcoming sequel to See No Evil, but before speaking with the mammoth monster himself, we had the opportunity to sit with stars Danielle Harris and Kaj-Erik Erikson as well as directors Jen and Sylvia Soska.
“In the movie I play Amy,” Harris (pictured) tells us of her character. “Amy works at the morgue and loves her job, dropped out of Med School to pursue it because she feels like at the end of the day we all end up here anyway.”
“She’s got some family issues, issues with her brother, issues with her mother … not too far from real life. *laughs* I just so happen to be working, on my character’s birthday, the night that … we pick up where the last one left off and there’s all these bodies … I’m always in the wrong place at the wrong time, man. We get all the bodies in, including the body of Jacob Goodnight. Of course he doesn’t stay down for long and he comes back and traps us in the hospital.”
Harris continues, “For me, I got to a point before this movie that I wasn’t a hundred percent sure how much more I could do in the genre that would be challenging because I kept getting the same kinds of roles. I’m a little older and it’s getting hard on me! Of course I want to be the lead, I want to be the final girl and fight the bad guy. And then, the reality sets in of how much can I really do in that short amount of time without ending up in the hospital or having a breakdown or serious health issues afterwards.”
“So this was an opportunity to play something I hadn’t really played. My reaction after seeing it was, ‘Oh wow, this is the first time I’ve sort of been me.’ I can be a feisty tough girl, as you know, but there’s a whole other side that I really don’t show that often and I think that’s a little bit more of what Amy is in this. She’s trying to keep everything together to help us go where we need to go. It was a rollercoaster from the first day, there was a lot of shit going on. You never know what door Jacob’s [WWE superstar Glenn ‘Kane’ Jacobs] gonna pop out of or bust through. He’s like the Kool-Aid guy,” Harris says with a laugh.
Our attention then turned to Harris’ co-star, Kaj-Erik Erikson (pictured). “I play Seth, a semi-nerdy kind of guy who works at the morgue. He’s a bit shy but he’s totally interested in Amy. [Danielle and I have] known each other for a long time and I think we’re both kind of similar to our characters.”
“It was nice for me to play a sweet, just kind of calmer, earnest guy because I normally play characters that have a bit of an edge or a chip on their shoulder and who’re usually pretty angry.”
Harris is no stranger to horror fans as she’s been in many an iconic film, but she never realized how much crossover there would be with the fans of the WWE Universe.
“I can’t wait to go to the panel today because I haven’t seen the WWE audience,” says Harris regarding meeting the audience at a presentation to be held later in the day. “I don’t know what they look like, I don’t know their enthusiasm. Could there be more fanatical people other than horror fans? Sci-fi, fantasy fans? I think this takes it to a whole other level. I went to ‘Monday Night Raw’ a couple months ago and I was shocked to be getting stopped to take pictures. I didn’t realize how closely the fan bases were connected. So now that we’re officially mixing the two? I’m kind of stoked to see how that’s gonna go down.”
“I think it might shake up the horror world and genre a bit because we don’t stick to the sort of predictable formula of most horror movies,” Erickson adds. “This is going to really mix things up for people and I think in a good way. You don’t want the same predictable story, and See No Evil 2 is anything but predictable.”
Harris jumps in with a huge grin on her face, “Even though this is a bit of a different kind of movie. all the good stuff stays! The sex… the blood… and the good kills and scares. All the by-the-book stuff is still there but the order of how things are put together and the look and the vibe and all that stuff is a little bit different.”
The chemistry between Harris and Erickson was undeniable so we can only imagine how well they work together on-screen. Even better, the duo completely clicked with the film’s directors, the Soska Sisters, and being that they got each other, everyone on the set was incredibly happy.
The sisters are extremely like-minded so it’s no surprise that having both of them on set on the same page, in the same paragraph, in the same sentence is totally the norm for them. “I don’t know how one director does it because we divide and conquer,”Jen tells us. “It’s not like having two separate people that have different opinions and different thoughts; it’s just one mind, two bodies. We go out and we can catch up with each other in an instant with just a simple glance. We can do so much more and cover so much more ground. Jen can be working with the director of photography and setting up the shots and talking to Danielle, and I can go off and talk to every other actor and I can check in on make-up. Everything just runs so smoothly.”
Given that the Soskas are so alike, we wondered if the cast and crew ever got a little mixed up. “Once you get to know us, we’re very different. If you get stuck talking to me, Sylvia, you’re like, ‘Oh, I need to get out of here and talk to Jen instead. Fuck! I talked to the weird one.’ I’m always with the AD and the DP and that kind of technical stuff and Jen’s very detail-oriented. And she has a soul, so she talks to the people like the actors and talks to them by their real names …”
Jen jumps in, “We’re also good cop and bad cop. Sylv’ will only talk to an actor if they did something really well or really not well, so when she comes over, they’re like, ‘Is it good?’ *both laugh*
The Soskas have come a long way in the genre in a really short time. They’re well on their way to becoming the first ladies of horror so we then inquired what it was like to work with a really seasoned scream queen like Harris.
“She has such a pedigree… she was practically born a horror icon,” Sylvia says of her star. “Plus, she’s a director, too, so it was so cool. She brought that kind of sensibility to the project. There were parts where we needed to do different lighting cues and things like that, and she knew exactly where to stand, she knew where to do all the movement, and was still a phenomenal actress. Hiring an actor like that… it’s a dream. I always say directing is 90% casting, 9% everyone in the crew making everyone look good and 1% me saying, ‘Go stand there.’ She’s just amazing. If there was a real Jacob Goodnight, I would hide with her. She’s an Amazon for fucking real.”
Jen adds, “Danielle Harris has one speed. Go.”
As for their leading monster…
“Kane is used to doing everything in one take in the WWE. Getting it right the first time,” Sylvia said. “That’s what he did on set. I said, ‘Glenn, at one point, you need to fuck up so I feel like I have a reason for being here,’ and he’s like, ‘What? What did I do wrong?’ *laughs* That’s how you are when you’re a WWE superstar. I take real offense to people who say WWE superstars can’t act. That’s all they do and they have to be more professional. They have millions of people watching them and hundreds of thousands of people in their face usually screaming bloody murder at them. That’s a lot of pressure.”
“And he fucks so much shit up in this movie. He’s crazy strong,” Jen says of the WWE’s demon. “There was this steel slab that we had three crew guys bring in and in the scene he’s supposed to knock it over, which he does, and then we say, ‘One more take!’ The three guys come to pick it up and Glenn’s like, ‘You need this picked up?’ One arm, puts it back. He could kill us all. Have you ever played Resident Evil: Nemesis? He’s Nemesis. He could come out of anywhere at anytime and just kick ass, and he does. And he’s smart… Jacob is really smart in the way he terrorizes these people in our movie. Make no mistake, though… [this one] has beautiful emotional scenes as well that were lacking in the first one because Glenn is actually a great actor.”
Jen… you had us at “he fucks so much shit up!”
Greyston Holt (“Bitten,” Lost Boys: The Tribe), Chelan Simmons (Tucker & Dale vs. Evil), Kaj-Erik Eriksen (Ice Twisters), and Lee Majdoub (Soldiers of the Apocalypse) star alongside Danielle Harris (the Halloween franchise), Katharine Isabelle (American Mary, Ginger Snaps, Freddy vs. Jason), and Michael Eklund (The Call, The Marine 3: Homefront, The Day) in the Soska Sisters-helmed See No Evil 2 starring WWE Superstar KANE®.
Lionsgate will handle worldwide distribution of See No Evil 2, while WWE Studios will utilize its extensive global reach through television, digital, and social media and print assets to market the film.
Want more? Be sure to follow @SeeNoEvil2movie on Twitter and like the See No Evil 2 Facebook page.
Synopsis
Jacob Goodnight (WWE superstar “Kaneâ€) fell to his apparent demise from high atop the Blackwell Hotel in See No Evil, and this terrifying sequel picks up where the last one left off. With Jacob’s body lying on a cold sub-basement slab in the city morgue, Amy (Danielle Harris), a mortician, is surprised when a group of friends pay her a late-night visit for her birthday. But the surprise soon turns deadly when the psychopath everyone believed to be dead sets-out on a horrific killing spree, and Amy and her friends must do whatever it takes to survive.
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