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Mary Elizabeth Winstead can’t wait for her next film, The Thing, to be released.
The US actress, who currently stars in Scott Pilgrim Vs The World, takes the lead role of feisty scientist Kate Lloyd in the sci-fi horror.
“It’s a really great, slow-burn sci-fi action film – it’s sort of creepy and refreshing in terms of the other horror sci-fi films that have been out lately. I think it’s something new and fun so I’m excited,” she said.
The Thing – billed as the prequel to John Carpenter’s 1982 cult classic – is set for release in 2011.
Mary Elizabeth explained: “It’s a prequel to the John Carpenter version so it’s set in the same time, in the 80s, and it takes place in Antarctica at a Norwegian base there so it’s a largely Norwegian cast aside from myself, Joel Edgerton and Eric Olsen.
“It starts off really slow, then this paranoia builds to when we realise this creature has broken out and is becoming different people and taking on the shape of the people in the base.”
(Source)
Sounds great. Can’t wait for the teaser to be released. Anyone else excited for the film?
Since I had so many interviews from Scott Pilgrim vs. The World to post last week, I decided to save one for the week after it opened as a bonus for fans and as a reminder that if you haven’t seen Scott Pilgrim, you really should. While Hollywood recycles the same stories all the time, Scott Pilgrim is an original movie told in an amazing way. It’s one of my favorite films of the year and I really recommend checking it out in a movie theater.
Anyway, during the Los Angeles press junket for the film, I was able to sit down with Mary Elizabeth Winstead for an exclusive interview. We talked about being at Comic-Con, the very cool t-shirts that were made for Scott Pilgrim, vintage clothing stores, her next movie The Thing, the city of Toronto, working for Edgar Wright, and a lot more. Hit the jump to check it out:
Regrettable, while I always post audio with my interviews, I’m away from home and didn’t bring the audio with me. When i get back I’ll update the story.
Collider: So you said earlier that you got the Ramona shirt? Is it cool for you to be walking around with it on or is there an issue with that?
Mary Elizabeth Winstead: There’s probably an issue with it but I don’t really care. I probably look narcissistic that I’m wearing my own character from my own movie on my own body, but I love it so much. At least it’s from a scene I’m not in. Well, I’m in the scene but I’m not in the shot. I don’t know, I wore it around Comic-Con and stuff. I don’t really know, we’ll see how I feel about wearing it in the general public. I don’t know if it will draw too much attention or not, but we’ll see. I want them anyway so I don’t care. [laughs]
It’s very hard to make a cool t-shirt and they have a bunch of them.
Winstead: They’re so cool! It’s hard because I want to wear them all. I know that it’s totally uncool. It’s like if you’re in a band and you’re wearing your own band t-shirt.
Read the full interview here
Mary Elizabeth Winstead may be the coolest genre girl around. She always ends up in these massive films like Live Free or Die Hard or Death Proof, horror like Final Destination or the upcoming The Thing or even kids’ superhero movies like Sky High. So it makes sense that she’d be the girl Scott Pilgrim is VS. The World for. She met the press with a more old fashioned hairdo (one color only) and dress, not like Ramona Flowers wears but still beautiful.
Q: When you see Ramona Flowers in the comic books, do you see yourself in that picture?
Mary Elizabeth Winstead: I don’t. I think while I was doing it, especially after four or five months of being Ramona every day I think I did kind of see myself when I would look at the books. Now I feel separated enough from it now that even when I look at the movie, I don’t even see myself. I see Ramona.
Q: When you transform yourself, even between scenes, how does that make you feel more like not yourself?
Mary Elizabeth Winstead: Oh, it’s such a huge help. I was still kind of worried about my portrayal of Ramona and how I was going to do it and just the daunting task of becoming her the whole time through preproduction and everything. The day that we all put the clothes on and got the wig on and the makeup and everything, I suddenly was like, “Okay, I get what Edgar saw.” Everyone was telling me, “You’re the perfect Ramona. You look just like Ramona.” I was like, “What are you talking about? What do you mean?” Then when we all got together and we had the complete looks, it all sort of clicked. It was surreal. That was a great thing to have before we started shooting because then we could all walk on the set and feel confident that we were right for the parts and that it was going to be okay.
Read the full interview here
Ain’t It Cool News sat down with the lovely Mary Elizabeth Winstead to discuss her upcoming movie “Scott Pilgrim VS. The World” as well as the prequel to The Thing film. Here’s an excerpt:
Quint: Wallace was more of a translation angle, like “Oh, I’m so glad that all of the humor from Wallace comes through and Kieran [Culkin] was perfect in the role,” but you, I think, had a little bit of a tougher job, because if you don’t buy Ramona that movie falls apart. Honestly the character is teetering on being somebody really despicable…
Mary Elizabeth Winstead: Yeah, absolutely. I definitely worried about that, to be honest. When I first took it on, it was sort of like “What do I do? I don’t want people to think she’s a bitch” and how do you play someone who doesn’t show their emotions? How do you play someone who is too guarded to ever let you know what they are thinking or feeling and still get across that they are human and they do have feelings? So, it was definitely the most challenging part I have ever had to play. I basically had to just constantly be feeling a lot of things and just bottle it up. Every scene I was in I was trying to bottle up whatever I was feeling.
To read the interview in it’s entirety, click here.
On a break shooting scenes for the upcoming prequel to John Carpenter’s 1982 horror classic The Thing, Winstead spoke with Under the Radar about screaming and scary movies, evil exes, and what it’s like to work with two geeks like Michael Cera and Edgar Wright.
Mike Hilleary: Looking at your filmography one would think you have a serious affinity for scary movies.
Mary Elizabeth Winstead: I know. I don’t know if I have an affinity for it or if it has an affinity for me or both. I’m not sure.
What is it about them that you enjoy so much as an actress?
I guess I like wondering if they’re going to scare me, trying to figure out if the film is going work on that level. I’m a pretty tough scare, so I enjoy that sort of test of it.
What have you been working on today?
Today we were shooting a scene that kind of goes back a little bit more towards the beginning of the film where things first start going wrong. Someone gets attacked, and it’s kind of a difficult scene because it involves about 15 people. Everyone at the base comes out and finds this bloody massacre out in the snow. Trying to deal with everyone and all of our reactions is pretty intense. But it’s fun. In between stuff it feels like we’re all in school or something just hanging out.
How would you describe Wright as a director?
He’s just one of those guys who knows what he wants. He had more faith in me than I had in myself, I think, because at that point I had to fight for everything. Nobody was offering me anything. To think that somebody would be offering me this part that so many other actresses would have wanted, it’s still a crazy thought. I honestly don’t know what goes on in his head or how he goes from one point to the other, because it really is just all in his head. He knows exactly what he wants, and whatever he says you do it and you know it’s going to be great. He has such a specific vision, a specific style. He’s extremely funny and charming and smart and he brings all of that to everything that he does. All of that together I think is what makes his films so great.
To check out the full interview, just click here.
A great panel Friday afternoon was the Entertainment Weekly panel Women Who Kick Ass, starring Elizabeth Mitchell of Lost and V, Anna Torv of Fringe, Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Ellen Wong of Scott Pilgrim vs the World, and Jena Malone of Sucker Punch.
Moderator Nicole Sperling asked the women if they were into comics or other geek stuff when they were kids. Torv used to dress up as Wonder Woman, while Malone and Wong preferred the Disney princess/heroines. Asked how hard it has been to get roles, Mitchell said she auditioned seven times and fought hard to play Juliet. On the other hand, she was given the role of Erika in V, which she found more terrifying. For Wong, nothing ever just falls into your lap, one has to fit for everything. She just tried to be herself in her audition for a Knives Chau, because she felt close to the character. Winstead said she would have fought hard to pay Ramona in Scott Pilgrim, but she was actually given the role. She would have fought for the role because Ramona is kind of tragic, but knows how to kick ass.
Do you expect to be role models? For Winstead, Ramona is a complete opposite from her, so she would like to take a bit of her “don’t care” attitude.
What was working with Quentin Tarantino like? It gave Winstead a great confidence that someone like him would want her in one of his films. He would sit down with her for an hour to tell her all the great things she did in a given scene, which was great for her as an actress.
What is your outlook on female characters having to be vixens? Winstead just filmed a movie where she plays a paleontologist that gets to kick alien ass, where in between takes the director told her not to get too pretty.
– All of the actresses agreed about the importance of attempting their own stunts. “Every actor I know wants to do their own stunts,” said Winstead, who worried about falling behind in her Scott Pilgrim training regimen when she was forced to take two weeks off due to illness.
To read the full interview click here
Breaking news!
‘The Thing’ prequel will strike theaters on April 29, 2011, distributor Universal Pictures announced today. The science-fiction horror thriller is currently the only nationwide release scheduled for that weekend, and it slots into the same timeframe that the Nightmare on Elm Street remake haunted earlier this year.
Described by Universal as a “prelude” to John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), the new Thing involves the discovery of an extraterrestrial organism and ship buried in Antarctica. The main character is a paleontologist played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Final Destination 3), who along with a scientific crew, must fight for survival when the organism is unleashed. The creature will be a shape-shifter that can replicate the humans, stirring paranoia as the characters get infected one-by-one.
The official synopsis reads
Antarctica: an extraordinary continent of awesome beauty. It is also home to an isolated outpost where a discovery full of scientific possibility becomes a mission of survival when an alien is unearthed by a crew of international scientists. The shape-shifting creature, accidentally unleashed at this marooned colony, has the ability to turn itself into a perfect replica of any living being. It can look just like you or me, but inside, it remains inhuman. In the thriller The Thing, paranoia spreads like an epidemic among a group of researchers as they’re infected, one by one, by a mystery from another planet.
Paleontologist Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) has traveled to the desolate region for the expedition of her lifetime. Joining a Norwegian scientific team that has stumbled across an extraterrestrial ship buried in the ice, she discovers an organism that seems to have died in the crash eons ago. But it is about to wake up.
When a simple experiment frees the alien from its frozen prison, Kate must join the crew’s pilot, Carter (Joel Edgerton), to keep it from killing them off one at a time. And in this vast, intense land, a parasite that can mimic anything it touches will pit human against human as it tries to survive and flourish.
(Source)
The opening chapter of The Thing saga has added another name to its ever growing list of people who will hopefully end up meat for the beast.
According to IMDB (and confirmed), Jonathan Walker (Land of the Dead, “Smallville”) has signed on to tackle everyone’s favorite imitating alien. He’ll star opposite the already announced Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Joel Edgerton, Dennis Storhøi, Trond Espen Seim, Jørgen Langhelle, Eric Christian Olsen, Stig Henrik Hoff, Jan Gunnar Røise, Kristofer Hivju and Jo Adrian Haavind.
Universal’s prequel to the John Carpenter classic The Thing is now shooting up in Toronto, Canada under the direction of Matthijs Van Heijningen. Look for more soon. (Source)
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