Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on October 15, 2009, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Being chased and terrorized by a rage-driven psychopath around and under a house would seem to be a pretty stressful situation, even if it’s just for a movie. But for Amber Heard, the young actress who co-stars in Screen Gems’ new remake of The Stepfather, it was all in a day’s work. “You know, it’s just like any aspect of my job,” she says of taking part in such cinematic mayhem. “It could be very weird, but because it’s so weird so often, it becomes very, very…unweird, if that makes sense. My job is funny that way, in that I come to set every day and there are plenty of crazy things going on. That’s not really one of them that sticks out.”
This statement won’t surprise anyone who has been following Heard’s career over the last few years. After attracting a wealth of positive attention in the title role of the slasher opus All the Boys Love Mandy Lane—albeit largely at festivals, since a commercial U.S. release remains stalled by distributor Senator Entertainment’s money problems—she has been all over the horror scene lately. She cuddles up to Jesse Eisenberg and then tries to eat his flesh in the current hit Zombieland, just wrapped a starring role in John Carpenter’s latest chiller The Ward and not only acted but served as a producer on another recently lensed redux, And Soon the Darkness.
“I’ve made it a point to take on as many movies in this genre as I feel like,” Heard says, adding that the Stepfather experience treated her to a few of her favorite things. “I loved the screaming, the fake blood, the action and the fight sequences,” she recalls. “I really enjoy that kind of thing. I had a few stunts, falling through the floor and jumping and screaming and swimming and crying and the rain machines—it was quite an action-packed experience for me. I had a great time working with the buzzsaw, even though it was a real saw; it was heavy, and half of the floorboards were missing as the setting demanded, so I could not step off of these planks, and it was really difficult to walk. For the scenes where the saw kind of falls over my face, it was made of rubber, of course; because of the weight, we couldn’t use the real one. For all of the scenes that lead up to that point, it was a real machine, though the blade itself was rubber.”
All this despite the fact that she’s not the principal young protagonist in the update of the 1987 cult classic. That Joseph Ruben-directed film had Jill Schoelen playing a teen rightfully suspicious of her mom’s new husband (Terry O’Quinn); the 2009 version has Michael (Gossip Girl’s Penn Badgley), a young man just home from military school, at odds with his mom’s new fiancé David (Nip/Tuck’s Dylan Walsh). Heard, who plays Michael’s girlfriend Kelly, notes that the gender switch adds a different dynamic to the movie’s tension. “The relationship between the stepfather and the stepchild is less…predatory, I guess,” she notes, “if it’s not a young woman and there isn’t that creepy, possibly sexual element. It becomes more about two adversaries, and it makes the competition a little bit fairer, in that sense. That’s all I can say about it, because I haven’t really seen the original.”
Avoiding a viewing of the ’87 Stepfather was a conscious decision on Heard’s part. “I choose not to watch the original when I’m working on a remake, if I haven’t already seen it,” she notes. “I tend to think that the remakes should be fun and cool unto themselves, so avoiding seeing [their predecessors] will help me to not accidentally imitate anything or inadvertently bring the old film into the new one. I want to keep it fresh and objective.”
She applied that philosophy to And Soon the Darkness, which takes its cues from a less well-known 1970 horror feature by Robert Fuest. It followed two girls on a bike-riding vacation in France who become separated, with one desperately trying to find the other under circumstances that increasingly suggest her friend has fallen victim to foul play. The redux, helmed by Marcos Efron, relocates the action to Argentina and pairs Heard—briefly—with Cloverfield’s Odette Yustman, with genre regular Karl Urban and Drag Me to Hell’s Adriana Barraza in supporting roles.
“I did not want to see [Fuest’s movie] because I was heavily involved in writing and editing the script,” says Heard, who notes that a draft “loosely based on the original” had been written when she came aboard. “I wanted to be extra-sensitive toward not bringing anything into this remake that was in the first film. I wanted it to exist on its own merits, as opposed to emulating anything from the previous version. I was involved in every step along the way of making this film, in terms of performance, the script we were going to perform, what we were wearing.”
It was her desire to be just that hands-on that led Heard to make her debut in the producer’s chair with Darkness. “I’ve worked for a long time in this field, and I am dedicated to it in more ways than I can properly articulate,” she says. “And from those years of experience, I have learned that it’s a sad thing to wrap, at the end of the project, and then hope for the best. I have seen that work out for me, and I have seen it really not work out for me, and that’s part of the pain of being an actor: You’re just there for the lines, and you have limited power over what it actually comes out looking like. As a producer, there are many elements you’re in control of that you’re not in control of as an actor. I feel like I truly connected with that job, because I’m so involved in this line of work and have been for so long that, you know, why not be as committed as possible?”
She went back to being solely a performer in The Ward, but the chance to collaborate with genre great Carpenter made it more than worthwhile. “It was amazing; I loved working with him,” Heard says. “For someone who enjoys making horror films as much as I do, that was a fantastic opportunity, and when I met with him for the first time a year and a half ago, I knew I was going to be in really good hands. I was involved with my character so much, and shocked at how open to creative collaboration he was. I felt like he and I made a really good team, that he’s a fantastic filmmaker and I could learn from him. And I really learned a lot.”
Scripted by Michael Rasmussen and Shawn Rasmussen, The Ward casts Heard as “Kristen, a young girl we meet at the beginning of the film as she’s being thrown into a mental institution in the mid-’60s. She meets a diverse range of people there, and she’s kind of the audience surrogate—the eyes of the audience as she goes through this circumstance. And then very strange things start happening, but you can’t necessarily trust what she’s seeing, because it’s an asylum, after all. All these weird events keep falling into place…and I’ll let the actual film take it from there.”
In the midst of all this heavy, horrific drama, Heard got to take part in a lighter view of the undead by enacting the first ghoul Eisenberg’s Columbus gets up close and personal with in Zombieland. “It was a blast doing that film; I had an amazing time,” she says. “I felt like it’s important as an actor, especially as a woman, to be able to have fun with your job and not take yourself so seriously. It’s important to embrace being ugly, if your character calls for it, and I had a lot of fun and thought maybe I wouldn’t get an opportunity to play a disgusting zombie again for a while. So why not?”
Her enthusiasm has been reflected in the box-office response to Zombieland, and now it remains to be seen if The Stepfather will receive the same favorable welcome from audiences. All Heard knows is, “It turned out exactly how I expected it to be. It was supposed to be a fun, young, fresh psychological thriller, and it turned out to be just that. It’s not really a horror film; the trailers kind of make it seem like more of one than perhaps it is, but it’s less gritty, and it’s based on the audience’s connections to the characters involved, and their subsequent storylines, as opposed to being about the blood and carnage. I knew what I was making when I did this a couple of years ago, and I have to say that it beat my expectations.”
