Your Monster Stars Open Up About the Unconventional Love Story

Horror films have a long tradition of featuring monstrous characters who fall for beautiful women, with there being literally hundreds of different love stories that explore entirely unique dynamics. The all-new movie Your Monster continues that tradition, though the actual specifics of the premise still manage to find new angles on the concept, making for an experience that manages to both feel entirely new yet also honors expected elements of such stories. Stars of the movie Melissa Barrera and Tommy Dewey recently weighed in on the emotional toll such a story took on them and what their own theories about the nature of this romance really was. Your Monster is in theaters now.

While discussing with ComicBook the physical toll having to cry regularly took on the actor, Barrera admitted, “I do cry a lot. I don’t swell a lot, honestly. My eyes don’t swell when I cry, so I don’t have that problem.” Dewey joked, “This is a true movie star quality, a real movie star. Their eyes do not swell when they cry.”

As far as which movies typically make the most emotional impact on them, Dewey detailed, “I’ve become a real crier since I had a kid. So I cry at episodes of Bluey. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Bluey. If you don’t have kids, probably not. It’s an Australian cartoon. There is a scene in Armageddon where Liv Tyler is saying goodbye to her dad, Bruce Willis, and she reaches for the screen and says, ‘Daddy,’ and I cry even right now.”

Barrera added, “I am also a big crier. I will cry at everything, but I think probably anything with a dog in it, or animals in general. Marley and Me, my husband paused and was like, ‘Are you okay? Can you keep watching this? I don’t think you should.’ Yeah, that was that was a rough watch.”

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Your Monster tells the story of the soft-spoken actor Laura Franco (Melissa Barrera), who is dumped by her longtime boyfriend (Edmund Donovan) while recovering from surgery and retreats to her childhood home to recover. With her future looking bleak, insult is added to injury when Laura discovers her ex is staging a musical that she helped him develop. But out of these gut-wrenching life changes emerges a monster (Tommy Dewey) with whom she finds a connection, encouraging Laura to follow her dreams, open her heart, and fall in love with her inner rage.

The movie questions whether this monster is a figment of Laura’s imagination or if they’re an actual figure, with Dewey weighing in on how he approached the role.

“Real entity, from the beginning,” the actor admitted of his theory. “And that’s not a commentary on the movie, but the way I approached it. I thought, ‘I have to be just all in. This is a fully formed, three-dimensional thing that exists opposite her. And then [director] Caroline [Lindy] can do all the work of figuring out what he is, really, in the universe of the movie. But I think he needed an intention and his own qualities and all of that stuff, and then Caroline could mess with the dialogue as we were making the movie.”

He continued, “So I thought it was my job to help get [Laura] back on her feet, to love her, to charm her, to do all of that stuff. And I thought it was probably best to do that as a fully formed, separate thing.”

Your Monster is in theaters now.

Will you be checking out the movie? Contact Patrick Cavanaugh directly on Twitter or on Instagram to talk all things Star Wars and horror!