The “Scream 5” star continues her final girl status in the sixth installment, bringing back more franchise favorites.
Over 25 years later and “Scream” is still upping the ante on gore. While a beloved legacy character finally met his match after a quarter-century of battling Ghostface, Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) and Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) remain synonymous with final girls everywhere.
Yet the next generation of Ghostface survivors has breathed new life into the franchise after the success of “Scream 5,” the first film without late creator Wes Craven’s involvement. And final girl 2.0, played by Jenna Ortega, just teased exactly how much new blood will be spilled by Ghostface in the sixth installment.
“Ghostface gets a lot more intimidating,” Ortega revealed to Entertainment Tonight after reading the script for “Scream 6,” penned by “Scream 5” screenwriters James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick. “It just gets more and more gory. I think that this is probably the most aggressive and violent version of Ghostface we’ve ever seen, which I think will really be fun to shoot.”
Principal photography for “Scream 6” starts this summer with Radio Silence’s Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett returning to helm the film, which is set for a March 31, 2023 release date. Ortega’s “Scream 5” co-stars Melissa Barrera, Jasmin Savoy Brown, and Mason Gooding will reprise their respective roles as the surviving foursome venture out of Woodsboro for a new start after surviving Ghostface’s terror.
And “Scream 4” alum Hayden Panettiere is back as wise-cracking cinephile Kirby, while Dermot Mulroney makes his franchise debut as a police officer. While franchise staple Campbell recently confirmed she will not be returning for the sixth film, Courteney Cox has said she will reprise the role of Gale Weathers.
Ortega raved about working with Panettiere, teasing, “She has been one of my favorite characters in the franchise for a long time so the fact that her character gets to come back and redeem herself is really exciting.”
Plus, Ortega’s “Scream” character Tara is a direct callback to Panettiere’s Kirby with a shared love of films.
And, as Ortega is also starring in Netflix’s “Addams Family” spinoff series “Wednesday,” it’s unclear if she’s even read the full “Scream 6” script yet, since even “Scream 5” star (and one half of the Ghostface killing duo) Jack Quaid revealed the cast didn’t even know who the killer was until production.
“I never knew at any given time. We figured it out eventually but in the beginning, we all had different scripts,” Quaid said earlier this year. “In some, certain characters died. In others, they didn’t; this person was the killer in this script; in others, they weren’t. So we all had our theories. We were getting to know each other but were also like, ‘You’re a bit suspicious…’”
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