Parker Finn, director of the breakout horror hit Smile and the upcoming Smile 2, is, well, all smiles about casting Naomi Scott (Charlie’s Angels, Aladdin) to play the lead in the sequel. “Naomi is a triple, quadruple, quintuple threat,” Finn marvels. “She is amazing.”
In Smile 2, Scott plays global pop sensation Skye Riley. About to embark on a new world tour, Riley begins experiencing increasingly terrifying and inexplicable events. Overwhelmed by the escalating horrors and pressures of fame, she must confront her dark past before her life spirals out of control.
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For the role of Skye Riley, Finn needed a lead actor who is able to personify the emotional fragility of someone grappling with the madness brought on by the curse, but additionally, have the charisma and musical ability of a global pop star.
When the director first met Scott – for what Scott assumed was a general meet and greet – they didn’t stop talking for over three hours. “We couldn’t speak fast enough,” recalls Scott. “I had no idea that this movie had music involved but I could see that Parker was itching to tell me about it.” Once the filmmaker revealed that the movie he was working on was about a singer, Scott thought, “Well, this sounds like me!”
Scott’s ability to do it all astounded Finn and the rest of the creative team. “We had a pretty significant audition process for the role of Skye,” admits Finn. “When I met Naomi, I was familiar with her work, but she had never done anything quite like this before. She had appeared in some big movies, but the characters she had played were the polar opposites of who Skye is. When we met, it was clear she had this other side to offer that nobody had had the opportunity or the fortune to put on screen yet.”
Skye is certainly a complex, troubled character. She’s a pop star making a triumphant return to the global stage after battling substance abuse issues and deep trauma following a tragic accident. But her life is about to take an even darker turn. “We meet her and although she’s sober, she’s incredibly numb,” explains Scott. “I don’t think she’s present in her body and she hasn’t dealt with a lot of the things she needs time and space to deal with. There’s a lot bubbling under the surface. But for someone who has to deal with everything she’s dealing with – it’s interesting that when she gets the curse, it activates this survival instinct of someone who really wants to live. She wants to survive.”
Scott also relished the opportunity to explore the simultaneously precocious nature and arrested development of a person who found fame so young. “She’s not someone who was born into any kind of privilege,” Scott says. “She’s someone who has had to fight for everything. And there was a version of herself that was projected back to her from the world. I think she felt a need to run with that and therefore didn’t have the space to discover who she was. When it comes to her music and her art, she’s very self-assured and is one of those artists who knows what they want. But outside of that, there’s a stunted maturity and a stunted growth with relationships. And as she relates to herself, I don’t think she knows who she is. So that was interesting and fun to play.”
It was this ability to dial into emotion and intensity, vacillating between extremes, that particularly impressed Finn. “Naomi is so unbelievably talented,” he says. “She can do everything. There are moments where she needs to be able to play a very elegant Grace Kelly-type in her public persona, and other moments where we see her at absolute rock bottom, at her worst. And Naomi did both with aplomb.”
Smile 2, distributed in the Philippines by Paramount Pictures through Columbia Pictures, is rated R-18 and will haunt Philippine cinemas – uncut – starting October 16. Join the conversation with the hashtag #Smile2 #SmileMovie and tag @paramountpicsph
