Judy Greer recently joined us for an episode of Collider Ladies Night in celebration of her new limited series, The Thing About Pam, and there was no way I was missing the opportunity to talk about one of my favorite filmmakers of all time, Greer’s Cursed director, Wes Craven.
The 2005 release stars Jesse Eisenberg and Christina Ricci as siblings who have a run-in with a werewolf. They’re scratched during the encounter and the movie follows what happens as they learn more and more about the curse they contract. Greer steps in as Joanie, a character who takes an especially dark turn when she winds up cursed herself.
During our conversation revisiting Greer’s journey from 1999’s Jawbreaker to starring opposite Renee Zellweger in The Thing About Pam, we carved out a chunk of time to talk about her experience working in the horror genre. Yes, we did discuss the Halloween franchise, specifically the ending of Halloween Kills, but when you work with a genre master like Craven, you can bet I’m going to highlight that as well.
Here’s what Greer said when asked to share some memories from working on Cursed:
“He printed out every single morning the New York Times crossword puzzle for everybody on set. There was a stack of them, and so every morning as everyone showed up for work, I can’t remember if it was his assistant or a script supervisor at the time, passed out the New York Times crossword puzzle. And so, we were all all day long working on the crossword puzzle. That was the thing we did all day as a family.”
Greer went on to highlight some qualities one might not expect from a horror filmmaker:
“Like you, being such a huge fan of Wes Craven and being so excited to work with him and really not having any sense of what to expect from this man, he was so kind and lovely and thoughtful. I guess I just didn’t expect that from someone who all I had heard about was how he would scream, ‘More blood, more blood, more blood,’ and how sweet he was. [The] set was really fun. It was like a really family-like environment.”
Looking for more from Greer? You’re going to want to check out our uncut Collider Ladies Night interview in podcast form below. That’s where you can find more on Halloween Kills, Jurassic World, what it meant to score a SAG ensemble nomination with the cast of The Descendants, and so much more!