The Mindy Project and Air star plays a grieving therapist in the latest Stephen King adaptation.
Chris Messinais not a huge horror fan, but the actorisenthusiastic aboutStephen King.
“Growing up,Stand by Mewas a huge movie for me.
Chris Messina in ‘The Boogeyman’.20th Century Studios
I wanted to be River Phoenix,” Messina tells EW.
The list goes on.
Jack Nicholson inThe Shining.
‘The Boogeyman’.Patti Perret/20th Century Studios
That performance I go back to time and time again."
Messina can now count himself among the actors who’ve tackled King.
He has difficulty comforting his two children, played by Vivien Lyra Blair andYellowjacketsstarSophie Thatcher.
How come he can’t figure out himself and help his daughters?"
A lot of times our lives are a bit of a mess.'
Messina felt “a lot of pressure” bringing that to life.
“It is the King short story, so we wanted to do it right,” he explains.
He reminded me of Chris Walken inTheDead Zone.
“He knows the genre so well,” Messina says.
“I just followed his lead, because he knows how to build the tension very specifically.
He knows how to create the jump scares.”
The most important lesson Messina learned from the Brit filmmaker?
Messina seems to have acquired a taste for genre filmmaking.
“We’re three Americans, and there’s three Russians, and we all get along beautifully.
Down below on earth, things have changed, and so now we start turning against each other.
It was a really fun movie to make.
I’d never been dangling for that many hours, pretending I was in zero gravity.”
“Boogieman 2: Electric Boogaloo,” the actor reveals, with a laugh.
“I say that all the time.
It’s perfect!”
The Boogeymanis now screening in theaters.
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