Scream VI Almost Included Another Character With an “Insane” Death

Scream VI was released in theaters this month, and it’s having a lot of success at the box office in addition to thriving on Rotten Tomatoes with a 77% critics score and a 92% audience score. The movie featured some new faces, and a new batch on Ghostface killers. Warning: Spoilers Ahead! For the first time in the franchise, the movie featured three killers. The ending of the new movie revealed that Detective Bailey (Dermot Mulroney) is actually the father of the previous film’s killer, Richie Kirsch (Jack Quaid). In addition to Bailey, the Ghostface killers were made up of Richie’s siblings, Quinn (Liana Liberato) and Ethan (Jack Champion). In a recent interview with Collider, Liberato revealed the movie almost included Richie’s mother, too. 

“There was talk of mom that didn’t make it in the film. I think there was a few lines of us – well not me, but Ethan sort of helping Bailey with the death of our mother because she didn’t agree with things. [Laughs] And that was cut! That was something. That line always made me giggle while we were filming because I was like, ‘That’s insane. I can’t believe we killed out mother,’” Liberato shared.

She continued, “Dermot was so funny because I’m the only one who has red hair in the family, and so he would always say that Nicole Kidman was our mother. And he was like, ‘Oh Nicole, so tall, so beautiful.’ He’d just riff off these crazy lines. But, I mean, based on the original script I read, mom is not in the picture. Mom did not make it to the party.”

In another recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Mulroney opened up about playing the movie’s villain.

“It’s really kind of a complex plan,” Mulroney explained. “[My character has] collected all of those artifacts, and called all those people in, and rented out that theater. Ridiculously complex but successful until our heroes take him out, right?” He added, “I was told by my agent, ‘Good news, we have a call from Scream VI, they want you, they can’t tell you anything else, but they need to let you know that you are the bad guy.’ … It wasn’t called ‘Ghostface’ there; it was just ‘the bad guy.’ I wasn’t even up on how intense people are following Ghostface. So then I get pieces of the script, but they neglected to tell me what part I’m playing. So I’m looking for two things when I’m reading the script, which part it is that I am and who it is in the script that’s going to wind up being Ghostface. So, for a while, I suspected that I was going to play the psychologist because Bailey is written so mildly I thought that’s probably not my part; it’s just a passing detective. It shows you that the script itself was quite ingenious in how they buried Bailey or made him incidental to scenes. Then I get to the end, and it is Bailey! It was me all along!”

Mulroney added of filming the final sequence, “It was glorious,” he said with a laugh. “It was glorious, and all of us were in a great mood because it’s that moment in the movies. Of course, what’s wonderful about that reveal scene in Scream VI is that it’s amidst this incredible action sequence, whereas in some of the earlier movies, it’s kind of a standalone scene in the house. This has nine other things going on at the same time. It was all of us together in that final conflict, and they were really exciting days to shoot.”

Scream VI is now playing in theaters.