Mckenna Grace isn’t just a burgeoning scream queen and pop culture afficionado; she has a full-on geek cred. She has powerful fanhoods to go along with the various franchises she’s collected in her filmography, and she has used those opportunities well (like knowingly sneaking game Easter eggs into her performance in Five Nights At Freddy’s 2). She is the kind of person who wears her passions on her sleeve… though that can have consequences – like her deep love of Scream adding a dash of awkwardness when she got the chance to meet OG franchise star Skeet Ulrich.
I spoke with Grace late last month in promotion of Five Nights At Freddy’s 2 arriving on the home video market, and it was while talking about her upcoming slate that the subject of the Scream franchise came up. Next month, we’ll see her become part of the legendary franchise via a mysterious part in Scream 7, and while she couldn’t tell me anything about the new film, she did tell me about how deep her fanhood runs. She told me,
I have this bag, actually, that I've had long… like, I snuck into a Scream cast photo op at a Comic-Con a couple years ago, long before I joined this franchise, and I have this bag that I bought at a ComicCon that has Skeet Ulrich and Matthew Lillard's face on it. And that's what I use as my set bag. I carry my script in that, my laptops in there, my water, my, like, everything I need… I didn't mean to, but I had it with me on Five Nights, of course, and Skeet Ulrich and Matthew Lillard are in there.
Mckenna Grace, Skeet Ulrich and Matthew Lillard are indeed all in Five Nights At Freddy’s 2, which makes for a cute bit of Scream-related trivia – but none of the actors actually share any scenes together. While Grace ends up being the principal antagonist in the movie, Lillard only appears in a pair of flashbacks, and Ulrich only has a single scene paired with star Josh Hutcherson.
While we don’t get to see Grace and Ulrich work together on screen, director Emma Tammi did the actress the favor of introducing the two of them on set… which inspired Grace to blush a bit because of her Scream bag:
The director decides one day like, ‘Oh, Skeet, come and meet Mckenna. She's a huge Scream fan, she would love to meet you.’ And I'm sitting there rifling through my bag with his face on it. I'm like, ‘This isn't weird at all.’ I'm a very big fan of Scream, so to not only get to join that franchise, but to get to go back to the roots and work with Kevin Williamson was such an honor.
We still don’t even know the name of Mckenna Grace’s character in Scream 7, but we do know that she is part of a talented ensemble that includes Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox,, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Mason Gooding, Joel McHale, Jimmy Tatro, and Matthew Lillard. We’re now less than one month away from seeing the anticipated upcoming horror movie on the big screen, with the film hitting wide release on February 27.
