Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire has a number of characters it’s juggling, and one of the vital wasn’t even truly within the movie’s advertising. That might be Melody, performed by Gossip Woman’s Emily Alyn Lind, a 16-year-old who shortly strikes up a friendship with McKenna Grace’s Phoebe Spengler. The twist? She’s a ghost pressured to remain on Earth till she finds a technique to reunite along with her household on the opposite facet.
In a latest Hollywood Reporter interview, Lind revealed that her ghost standing was one thing even she didn’t learn about till she’d locked down the position. Director Gil Kenan by no means explicitly stated as such throughout their talks, and features like “I get it. I’m like 100 years previous,” she simply assumed that translated to Melody being an previous soul. As for why it was stored secret, she reasoned it got here from her character being “a distinct form of ghost” for the sequence. As a substitute of being purely chaotic or malevolent, Melody’s “a ghost with a coronary heart,” just like Ghost Egon in Ghostbusters: Afterlife. “[She] has a full human relationship, so I believe that there was part of them that actually wished to catch individuals off guard in that sense.”
Within the movie, Melody’s caught in limbo after her household died in a home fireplace she personally feels liable for. Her selections within the movie all stem from that survivor’s guilt, and Lind was frannk in saying she’s glad her character noticed the error of her methods: for one factor, attending to staff with the OG and new Ghostbusters on the finish had her “so giddy,” and he or she liked sharing the display with sequence veterans like Ernie Hudson and Annie Potts. But it surely additionally meant of us wouldn’t go away the theater calling for her head, “identical to they’ve hated me in different movies for fucking the story up.”
As for Melody and Phoebe’s friendship and all of the subtext within the film, Lind known as their dynamic one in all “two souls connecting.” Whereas she acknowledged elements of it may be learn as romantic—and that Phoebe wished a closeness with somebody—each characters are “nonetheless two children in a number of methods. They’re minimize from the identical material and ousiders in their very own methods. […] And now they’re connecting on this grandiose stage in two completely different dimensional planes, and so they’re simply making an attempt to determine this world collectively. I like that we didn’t outline it as one factor or one other. Generally, when individuals do this, it ruins it. It’s too concrete and absolute, and so they’re so not absolute as characters.”
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is now taking part in in theaters.
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