When Skeet Ulrich sat down with Collider to discuss his time within the Scream film franchise, the interview answered many important questions and brought fans a renewed sense of appreciation for the film we’ve loved for 25 years. The movie introduced many of us to slasher horror in a wonderfully ironic way.
Ulrich knows that the film contained all of the necessary components, and that’s part of what made it the overwhelming success that it still is, this many years later. The other part was the way the cast and crew worked together to form something so iconic.
The interviewer asked Ulrich to remember burning questions for Craven during their discussions before the movie. He said while he doesn’t really remember burning questions — he does recall conversations about the psychology of it all.
“I’m sure there were some (burning questions), but I know there was a concentration on the psychology a lot. I think we both had the instinct to lean into kind of pointing the finger at Bily in the beginning so that the audience would think ‘no, that’s too obvious — there’s no way.’ I just sort of focused on the psychology of a killer and only that.”
He went on to say that Craven talked to him about his casting choice as far as Billy Loomis was concerned, and he hit the nail on the head.
“I know he talked to me a bit about the reason he cast me it was because I was believable as a sweet kid but I was also believable as a crazy kid.”
When you think back to Loomis, he was the perfect mix of sweet and sour. There are memes galore on social media that show photos of Ulrich as Loomis that say everything from: “I could have fixed him” to “This is where my obsession with bad boys began.”
Craven and Ulrich created the perfect masked slasher. He was the complete teenage dream that no one could have expected, and his character did exactly what he was supposed to. He convinced us all that, despite the obvious signs, he wasn’t — he couldn’t be the killer.
Until, of course, he admitted that we all go a little mad, sometimes.
