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INTERVIEW: William Sadler Embraces Death Once More in ‘Bill and Ted 3’

Published

4 years ago

August 28, 2020

If you had asked William Sadler a decade ago if he ever thought he’d don the robes and make-up to play Death in a new Bill and Ted movie, he would have told you definitely not.

It wasn’t that he was against the idea. He just never thought it would happen.

Then, about three years ago, screenwriter Ed Solomon contacted Sadler out of the blue and said he was writing a new Bill and Ted sequel and wondered if the actor would be willing to come back to the franchise.

“I said, yeah absolutely,” Sadler told iHorror in a recent interview for the film. “Then they had trouble getting backers and the studios didn’t want to go near it. They had the money and then the money fell through. It was just this odyssey until it was greenlit, until we were actually filming it. Then all the sudden everyone said, ‘Oh, of course, that’s a great idea.’ I guess it was meant to be.”

With that studio green light, however, there was some trepidation about stepping back into a role that Sadler had not played in almost three decades. It was time to break out the old DVD and remind himself what his version of Death looked like and how he acted..

Then, when he arrived on set, something magical happened for the actor.

“As soon as I started doing the Czechoslovakian accent and got the makeup on and the robes, it was like I’d been carrying him around in my pocket for ages and I could finally let him out,” Said said with a laugh. “He just took off. It was great. It was not hard to slip back into that character.”

It had been almost 30 years since William Sadler had played the role of Death.

Sadler is no stranger to slipping into unusual characters, and he’s very good at it. The character of Death comes with an added layer of camouflage, however. Hiding behind the skeletal makeup of the Grim Reaper has its advantages and offers a kind of freedom in its anonymity.

It was fun and exciting for the actor who says there were some people on the production, and particularly the new cast, who probably never knew what his actual face looked like while they were filming.

His time on the production ultimately felt like a reunion of sorts, working with Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter again and seeing how they’d changed and grown as actors in the interim. This is to say nothing of the new cast members who, Sadler says, were brilliant.

“The actors, all these new faces; it was exciting to be there for me,” he explained. “Samara [Weaving] and Brigette [Lundy-Paine], I mean, they were just delightful. That can’t have been easy for them either. Step into a franchise that started before they were born. The rest of us have been on this bus for a long time and they were brand new shiny actors. I thought they were terrific. They were fun to work with.”

Sadler was impressed with both Samara Weaving and Brigette Lundy-Paine in the film.

Now that the movie has officially premiered, the actor hopes that the themes of the film work their way into the minds of those who see it, and that maybe receiving those messages will help heal some of what’s going on in the world.

“We had no idea [while filming] the world was going to be hit with this pandemic and everything else that has happened to this country in the meantime,” Sadler said. “The message is potent and timely. We have to pull together. We can get through this but this is how you do it. The world is really just a small town. You work together and you can get through anything. Be excellent to each other. Wouldn’t it be something if Bill and Ted actually saved the universe?”

That would be something, indeed, William Sadler.

Bill and Ted Face the Music is out today in theaters and on VOD platforms. Check out the trailer below and party on, dudes!

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Movies

‘Evil Dead’ Film Franchise Getting TWO New Installments

Published

2 hours ago

April 26, 2024

Timothy Rawles

It was a risk for Fede Alvarez to reboot Sam Raimi’s horror classic The Evil Dead in 2013, but that risk paid off and so did its spiritual sequel Evil Dead Rise in 2023. Now Deadline is reporting that the series is getting, not one, but two fresh entries.

We already knew about the Sébastien Vaniček upcoming film that delves into the Deadite universe and should be a proper sequel to the latest film, but we are broadsided that Francis Galluppi and Ghost House Pictures are doing a one-off project set in Raimi’s universe based off of an idea that Galluppi pitched to Raimi himself. That concept is being kept under wraps.

“Francis Galluppi is a storyteller who knows when to keep us waiting in simmering tension and when to hit us with explosive violence,” Raimi told Deadline. “He is a director that shows uncommon control in his feature debut.”

That feature is titled The Last Stop In Yuma County which will release theatrically in the United States on May 4. It follows a traveling salesman, “stranded at a rural Arizona rest stop,” and “is thrust into a dire hostage situation by the arrival of two bank robbers with no qualms about using cruelty-or cold, hard steel-to protect their bloodstained fortune.”

Galluppi is an award-winning sci-fi/horror shorts director whose acclaimed works include High Desert Hell and The Gemini Project. You can view the full edit of High Desert Hell and the teaser for Gemini below:

^{High Desert Hell}

^{The Gemini Project}

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Movies

‘Invisible Man 2’ Is “Closer Than Its Ever Been” to Happening

Published

4 hours ago

April 26, 2024

Timothy Rawles

Elisabeth Moss in a very well-thought-out statement said in an interview for Happy Sad Confused that even though there have been some logistical issues for doing Invisible Man 2 there is hope on the horizon.

Podcast host Josh Horowitz asked about the follow-up and if Moss and director Leigh Whannell were any closer to cracking a solution to getting it made. “We are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” said Moss with a huge grin. You can see her reaction at the 35:52 mark in the below video.

^{Happy Sad Confused}

Whannell is currently in New Zealand filming another monster movie for Universal, Wolf Man, which might be the spark that ignites Universal’s troubled Dark Universe concept which hasn’t gained any momentum since Tom Cruise’s failed attempt at resurrecting The Mummy.

Also, in the podcast video, Moss says she is not in the Wolf Man film so any speculation that it’s a crossover project is left in the air.

Meanwhile, Universal Studios is in the middle of constructing a year-round haunt house in Las Vegas which will showcase some of their classic cinematic monsters. Depending on attendance, this could be the boost the studio needs to get audiences interested in their creature IPs once more and to get more films made based on them.

The Las Vegas project is set to open in 2025, coinciding with their new proper theme park in Orlando called Epic Universe.

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News

Jake Gyllenhaal’s Thriller ‘Presumed Innocent’ Series Gets Early Release Date

Published

7 hours ago

April 26, 2024

Timothy Rawles

Jake Gyllenhaal’s limited series Presumed Innocent is dropping on AppleTV+ on June 12 instead of June 14 as originally planned. The star, whose Road House reboot has brought mixed reviews on Amazon Prime, is embracing the small screen for the first time since his appearance on Homicide: Life on the Street in 1994.

Jake Gyllenhaal’s in ‘Presumed Innocent’

Presumed Innocent is being produced by David E. Kelley, J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot, and Warner Bros. It is an adaptation of Scott Turow’s 1990 film in which Harrison Ford plays a lawyer doing double duty as an investigator looking for the murderer of his colleague.

These types of sexy thrillers were popular in the ’90s and usually contained twist endings. Here’s the trailer for the original:

According to Deadline, Presumed Innocent doesn’t stray far from the source material: “…the Presumed Innocent series will explore obsession, sex, politics and the power and limits of love as the accused fights to hold his family and marriage together.”

Up next for Gyllenhaal is the Guy Ritchie action movie titled In the Grey scheduled for release in January 2025.

Presumed Innocent is an eight-episode limited series set to stream on AppleTV+ starting June 12.