Melissa Barrera Explains Why Her Abigail Character Feels Surprisingly Protective Over A Vampire

Summary Abigail perfectly balances humor and horror, much like Ready or Not and Scream, with a stacked cast led by Melissa Barrera.

Incorporating ballet into the character of Abigail adds a unique physicality, showcasing the duality of vulnerability and toughness.

Alisha Weir shines as the vampiric ballerina, delivering a standout performance with a challenging monologue scene.

Abigail follows a group of criminals set on pulling off a horrifying heist, kidnapping a young girl for ransom back to her father. After they pull it off, tensions run high, and strange occurrences in the house raise questions about who they are actually ransoming, only to discover her father is a powerful underworld figure. However, much to their horror, not all is as it seems, and they soon discover that they are not the true monsters but are instead trapped in the house with a killing machine in the form of a ballerina vampire.

Abigail perfectly taps into the balance of humor and horror that Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett have mastered with Ready or Not, Scream, and Scream IV. The movie has a stacked cast, reuniting Radio Silence with Melissa Barrera after her exit from the Scream franchise. Abigail is a genre-bending adventure combining a heist movie with a blood-soaked monster movie.

Related New Vampire Movie Abigail Continues Rotten Tomatoes Trend For Acclaimed Horror Directors The new Universal vampire horror movie Abigail starring Melissa Barrera and Dan Stevens continues a Rotten Tomatoes hot streak for its directors.

Screen Rant interviewed Abigail stars Melissa Barrera and Alisha Weir about their new horror movie. Weir broke down how the directors brought ballet into the physicality of Abigail throughout the movie and which scene she found the most challenging. Barrera explained why she wanted to lean into the complexities of her character, Joey, including her simultaneous toughness and maternal protectiveness.

Alisha Weir Explains How Ballet Was Incorporated Into Every Element of Abigail

Ballet was always intended to be a part of Abigail, but when Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett learned that Weir was a skilled dancer in her own right, they made it a much more prevalent part of her character. Ballet is infused throughout her character from how she carries herself, stands, and moves.

Alisha Weir: Well, we wanted to infuse it and incorporate it so that no matter what Abigail was doing, even when she was standing or running or fighting or chasing people on banisters, she was always doing it, like, she could do it in her sleep and in a balletic and lyrical way. Although there is the difference between, at the start of the film when you see her in the theater and she's graceful and she's so elegant, and then there is the difference. When she is a vampire, she's more fierce, but she still is doing it so gracefully and like she could do it in her sleep. So we tried to make it so that no matter what she was doing, even standing, she always had her feet turned out, she always had her foot pointed. She was never not doing it. She wasn't a ballerina.

Melissa Barrera Breaks Down Her Abigail Character: "Tough And Soft At The Same Time"

Barrera is no stranger to playing complex characters, especially in the horror genre, and Abigail shows off her skills with this once again. As one of the criminals in the kidnapping scheme, her toughness isn't in question, but the bond she forms with Abigail comes as a surprise. Barrera explained why it is more interesting to play a character with this duality between vulnerability and toughness.

Melissa Barrera: It's not hard to tap into that because as human beings we are all of that. I think what I really wanted to do is sometimes in these types of movies, the characters are like, if they're a badass, that means that they're tough and that's it. I wanted really to show that Joey is tough and she's a badass and she's a warrior, but she's also soft and she has this motherly protective quality that I think is beautiful. That actually, I think, in a lot of ways helps her to survive as long as she does. I think it's more interesting to allow women to be that, to be able to be tough and soft at the same time. I wanted Joey to present at the beginning, which is why I picked that haircut and the makeup and the outfit. Everything about her is tough, but I wanted the softness that comes across with Abigail to be a little bit surprising. This movie, all the characters, I think you meet them and you think you know who they are, and then you're surprised and you're actually like they're bad people because they're criminals, they're kidnapping someone, but they're not all bad. I actually kind of love them and that's the reality of how we are as humans. We live in a gray area.

Weir does a truly impressive job as the titular vampiric ballerina in Abigail. She presents herself as an innocent young girl until the monster comes out showing her true form to these criminals. One scene where she taps into her menacing nature as a vampire was especially difficult for the young star due to the long monologue she delivers.

Alisha Weir: I think the most difficult scene for me to shoot was the scene where I'm in the cage and I have all the dialogue and I'm explaining to everyone that Abigail knows everything about everyone and basically not to mess with her. So getting to do that scene with so much dialogue, I didn't want to mess it up and I wanted to make it so that she knew everything about everyone, but that it made sense and not to basically mess it up. So I was practicing and practicing and she had lots of dialogue. So I was learning it for a long time. And I think that was probably the most challenging scene, but yet probably one of the funnest scenes to film for me, because the excitement and the adrenaline that I felt for that scene was so exciting, but also a bit nerve wracking as well.

About Abigail

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After a group of would-be criminals kidnap the 12-year-old ballerina daughter of a powerful underworld figure, all they have to do to collect a $50 million ransom is watch the girl overnight. In an isolated mansion, the captors start to dwindle, one by one, and they discover, to their mounting horror, that they’re locked inside with no normal little girl.

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Abigail hits theaters on April 19.

Source: Screen Rant Plus