Kathryn Newton Finally Lets Her Freaky Flag Fly

By Brennan Carley


There’s a moment in horror hit-factory Blumhouse’s bloody new Freaky Friday sendup that will rattle you to your core. It’ll shock you more than the movie’s wickedly inventive kills (to avoid ruining the fun, we’ll just put the words “buzz saw” here). It’ll make you shriek even louder than the sight of Vince Vaughn spending Freaky’s run time expertly emulating the behaviors of a high school girl. The scene doesn’t involve blood, gore, or jump scares; really, it’s just a little bit of dialogue delivered so effortlessly and expertly that it’s all although predestined to go down in scary-movie history.


The line is uttered by the movie’s star, Kathryn Newton, who’s speedily gaining a reputation as one of Hollywood’s most in-demand young actors. At a unsanctioned party while in a town-wide lockdown (triggering!), A football jock crassly propositions a fellow student; little does he know her strings are being pulled by a loose-screwed mass-murderer. Full sociopath-mode activated, Newton — eyes ablaze — dismisses him with the frigid, fucked-off coolness of a top-of-the-line Sub Zero: “Your touch makes this pussy drier than sandpaper, you fucking monkey.” She pauses, lapping up the silence. “I can’t wait to kill you.” Mic… dropped, shattered, and eviscerated.


In the absence of geopolitical rhyme or reason and faced with ongoing evidence that American democracy is far more rickety a conceit than several of us would’ve ever guessed, there’s fleeting comfort to be noticed in scream queens, the only royalty this side of the Atlantic we all agree upon. From Jamie Lee Curtis’s film debut as Laurie Strode in 1978’s Halloween to Drew Barrymore’s first-act-and-finished scene-stealing Scream role, moviegoers have embraced our scream queens as emblems of our shared struggle and hopeful resilience. Newton definitely walks in their footsteps as Millie Kessler, Freaky’s innocent, all-American heroine. Although she truly makes her mark because the Blissfield Butcher, the movie’s body-swapped villain, who operates with a undercurrent of energy rippling through her (or is it his?) Every step.


When Newton and I talk in mid-October, she’s energy, all of the time, bounding back and forth between Zoom calls in Los Angeles, a tumbler of iced coffee in her hands as her hair and face are hastily attended by a masked glam squad who rush in and out of frame at lightning speed. You wouldn’t know we’re in the middle of a pandemic, or an election, or discussing a slasher movie where one character gets literally shattered to pieces. “I feel sort of like a poodle,” Newton cheerily tells MTV News, as her hair is brushed and set into place. “This is so fun.”


Newton began acting at age four, first in soaps (All My Children) and sitcoms (Gary Unmarried) before graduating to roles in the long-running CW hit Supernatural and cult-favorite Halt and Catch Fire. It wasn’t up until 2017 that the world started taking real notice of the then-20-year-old’s blossoming career, following a murderer’s row of assignments that put the actor on the map and in the crosshairs of casting directors all over town. That year, Newton appeared in Greta Gerwig’s indie darling Lady Bird; the runaway HBO hit Big Little Lies, because the daughter of Reese Witherspoon’s closesly wound Madeline Mackenzie; the award-winning Three Billboards Outdoors Ebbing, Missouri; and an oft-overlooked BBC adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Everything since has felt lightning-fast and well-deserved: a breakout role in 2018’s laugh-a-minute Blockers, a Psyduck-training junior reporter in Detective Pikachu, Julia Roberts’s daughter in the somber addiction drama Ben Is Back, and the intrepid leader of a crowd of leaderless teens in Netflix’s beloved The Society (the streamer scrapped plans for a recommended second season earlier this year because of the continuous coronavirus pandemic).


Any time Freaky’s creative team came calling last year, Newton says, it felt like she’d played her cards flawlessly. The role felt different and creatively tough, presenting her the possibility to reteam with Paranormal Activity 4 writer Christopher Landon. While Millie felt like a manifestation of her own personality (“I am such a dork: I like sweaters, and I'm a grandma,” she jokes), the Butcher felt confident, carefree, and just damn cool. “I have three poodles and Barbies… I am not cool at all,” she says. “Doing this movie, any time Whenever I would walk on set because the Butcher holding a chainsaw or a knife and people would look at me and be like, ‘You look… cool,’ I [felt like I’d] I got everybody tricked. I learned that you can’t sell yourself short.”


For Freaky, Newton drew on years of studiously dissecting horror movies like Diablo Cody’s black comedy Jennifer’s Body and learning to mimic Barrymore’s iconic Scream howls in her family’s car: "I would practice my scream and record it and my mom could be like, ’That one hurt my ears,’” she says. She imbues her Blissfield Butcher with steely-eyed malice that milks silence for scares. And much like the fantastical nevertheless ultimately warmhearted Freaky Friday to which the movie pays winking homage, Freaky traffics in much more than just body-swapping and chopping. “It’s about believing in yourself,” she says. “[Millie has] a lot going on for her, yet it is irrelevant because she doesn't visualize it. And yes it literally takes becoming this to believe in herself.”


Though Newton has been paying her dues for years, she’s still frequently tasked with falling in rank in support of the icons around her, whether it’s in service of Frances McDormand in Three Billboards or Roberts in Ben Is Back. Yet in Freaky, Newton serves as Vaughn’s foil, balancing the comedy legend’s sugar with a heap of much-needed salt, taking the long-established notion of a scream queen and turning her indoor out as a drifter with a taste for blood. “Vince was really supportive in setting the tone, because we all know that this movie is bonkers,” Newton says. “The stakes are so high. It [could’ve been] so over the best so easily.”


Yet, “by the end, you're rooting for the Butcher,” Newton adds with a grin, referencing the swaths of high school bullies, power-hungry teachers, and dumb-as-rocks jocks he axes while in. “You want the bad guy to win as the bad guy keeps killing all of the [real] bad guys. I think it broke all tropes, all of the clichés, and we need that right now: a fresh take on a story that we love.”


Playing two polar opposite characters came of course to Newton, she says, considering the collaborative partnership she forged with Vaughn while they met time throughout a choreography lesson for Blissfield’s cheerleading squad. “We were doing ‘Hail, hail, Blissfield High!’” She says, nailing the arm-ography from her chair. “Immediately I might visualize he was planning to play. Was so excited As soon as I had scenes with Vince. That was my best work because he's so spontaneous. It just makes everything magical, to be in the moment with someone who's so funny — it made me so much better.”


“She’s excellent, funny, talented and easy to be around,” Vaughn says of his Freaky scene partner. “She’s dedicated, focused, and has a terrific attitude — [and I learned watching her] that someone can learn a dance routine faster than you and still be humble.”


Though Newton has graduated from key ensemble player to leading lady in the past year, she says finally earning the best spot on call sheets hasn’t changed her outlook on choosing or preparing for roles. “My whole life, I've Been so lucky with the assignments that I've gotten,” she says, citing Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, and Shailene Woodley as ladies she liked first before they became on-set role models. “They've just changed my life. To have people you look up to like that believe in you and show you just by being themselves, I just felt this was the [right] way to do it [myself].


 


Nevertheless Freaky is starting in a post-election landscape, and yet horror is, and routinely has been, a genre best enjoyed collectively, Newton is decidedly unconcerned that the circumstances aren’t… ideal to launch a big-budget, would-be blockbuster. “It's a reflection of the times that we're in and you're going to be able to see yourself in it,” she says. “You're going to be able to see your companions. It's funny, it's crazy, and it's joyfully scary. You're going to have fun watching this movie and I think we all need to have fun right now.”


without end to the pandemic in our immediate line of sight, Newton says she’s happily taken the past seven or eight months to reevaluate the next roles she’ll pick and the steps she’ll take to stack new levels onto the structure she’s been steadily building for the past two decades. “Whatever I do next, I have to really love,” she says. “You don't know what you're capable of up until you try. I'm still figuring it out. Although maybe I’ve got to dream bigger.”