“I’m just so grateful on what I got to infuse in the franchise, and that’s something I’ll be proud of forever,” Melissa Barrera told Deadline at Sundance tonight, indicating no bad blood after being severed from the Scream series by Spyglass Media last month.
Barrera has clearly moved on, and she has a new horror movie here in Park City in the Midnight section, Your Monster from Caroline Lindy. In the pic, Barrera plays a soft-spoken actress, who finds her voice again after she meets a terrifying, yet weirdly charming Monster living in her closet.
Spyglass dropped Barrera from Scream VII after she reignited the franchise with Jenna Ortega in Scream V and Scream VI (the latter the highest grossing stateside in the horror series at $108M) due to remarks on social media about the Israel-Hamas conflict. The actress days after the firing broke her silence on the studio’s maneuver saying, “I will continue to speak out for those that need it most and continue to advocate for peace and safety, for human rights and freedom…Silence is not an option for me.” Deadline told you that Ortega wound up departing the series due to Wednesday scheduling conflicts; in addition the seventhquel’s new director Christopher Landon who called the short pre-production experience on social “a dream that turned into a nightmare.”
Last weekend at the MPTF’s 17th Annual Evening Before Gala, Barrera, Ortega and a slew of actors from the last two Scream movies reunited for a photo that was posted on Instagram. The photo included Jasmin Savoy Brown, Mason Gooding, Liana Liberato, Tony Revolori, Jack Quaid and Barrera’s on-screen father and OG Ghostface Skeet Ulrich.
Deadline asked Barrera tonight how it felt to be back with the old gang.
She told us, “We’re family for life.”
“If we’re ever in the vicinity of each other, we always find each other and that’s what happened at that event,” she continued.
“When we find each other, we just want to spend the night with each other, and nothing is ever going to change that.”