A few weeks ago, Dan Stevens teased the possibility of a sequel to Adam Wingard’s 2014 picture The Guest. The cult favorite was recently added to Netflix, and is well worth a watch for anyone wanting to see Stevens as a U.S. soldier who unexpectedly turns up at a family’s home. The actor doubled down on his interest in a follow-up to The Guest in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter this week, albeit while still noting that his collaborators are pretty busy right now.
Stevens had this to say about the prospect of working with Wingard and writer Simon Barrett again:
“Well, I suppose it starts with Simon (Barrett) and Adam (Wingard). Unfortunately, Adam is a little busy with [Godzilla vs. Kong] at the moment. But we’ve all sort of been looking at ways we can get back together in some way, and I think it will happen as soon as we can make it happen. I don’t know about whether that will necessarily be a sequel to The Guest. I don’t know how that would look, but we’ve got a few other things up our sleeves, perhaps, before then.”
The comments about The Guest sequel being just one of the projects that Stevens could do with Barrett and Wingard are a bit more reserved than what we received a few weeks ago, but it does seem that the idea is still in the mix if schedules line up. As Stevens notes, Wingard is deep into post-production on Godzilla vs. Kong, which was the subject of multiple delays even before COVID-19, and is now expected in May 2021. Barrett is also busy working on the horror film Seance.
Stevens’ attachment to The Guest isn’t surprising, given that he was primarily known for his role on Downton Abbey before proving he could play a very different type of character in The Guest. Since then, he’s achieved critical success for playing the lead role in FX’s Legion, which required him to portray multiple versions of the troubled David Haller. Other major credits for Stevens, meanwhile, include Beauty and the Beast, while he’s more recently provided a distinctive contribution to Netflix’s Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga.
At present, it’s difficult to see The Guest sequel happening any time soon, although it does seem likely that Stevens, Wingard and Barrett will be teaming up again at some point in the future. Wingard’s also not averse to making sequels, so we wouldn’t put it past the director and Barrett to come up with a suitable idea for developing the world of The Guest.
