Timothy Olyphant Reflects on “Overwhelming” Time Making Scream 2

Early in his career, Justified star Timothy Olyphant showed up in Scream 2, appearing as Mickey Altieri, the franchise’s third Ghostface killer and the film’s antagonist. He only had the one appearance in a Scream movie, but coming so early in his career, it’s still something that a lot of fans still think about when Olyphant’s name comes up. During a recent chat with Josh Horowitz on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Olyphant looked back on what he called an “overwhelming” experience as the nemesis to Randy Meeks and partner(ish) to Nancy Loomis.

He also had an outsized impact on the franchise, because even though there had been plenty of Ghostfaces, in his case he had no real connection to Woodsboro, proving that the killer really could be anybody, and that the story of the Woodsboro killings had gotten so big that there was very little safety anywhere for Sidney.

“That whole movie was overwhelming and exciting, and that’s early. That’s me just trying to keep my head above water and pretend like I’m not freaking out inside,” Olyphant recalled. “That was quite a job. I was still maybe lying on my resume when I got that gig; I hadn’t done a lot. I auditioned at least twice, maybe more to get the gig. Huge opportunity, and I showed up and everybody on that set was people I’d been watching on television and film. Liev Schrieber made quite an impression; I was like, ‘This guy is the real deal.’ Laurie Metcalf, and just everybody involved. It was big.”

You can see the full interview below, with the Scream 2 comments at around 33 minutes:

He added that Wes Craven approached him with some constructive criticism, which almost completely disarmed him given how young and inexperienced he was, even though Craven himself was great during the production.

“I remember that day…I was going off-camera for a while in the big finale. We were shooting all of Jerry O’Connell’s stuff, and Neve’s stuff, and then we were getting ready to turn around,” he added. “We had a half-hour break, and Wes comes up to me and says, ‘You know, we really haven’t talked about this last scene. I’m nto sure what you’re doing off-camera.’…I remember him saying, ‘You know, this killer in that movie, we don’t really want to do that, or this famous killer had a performance in that movie, and we don’t want to do that, we want to go in this direction,’ and I just start freaking out….I just remember being so intense, and feeling, like, I’ve got to get this right.”

Here’s the official synopsis for Justified: City Primeval:

“Having left the hollers of Kentucky eight years ago, Raylan Givens now lives in Miami, a walking anachronism balancing his life as a U.S. Marshal and part-time father of a 14-year-old girl. His hair is grayer, his hat is dirtier, and the road in front of him is suddenly a lot shorter than the road behind. A chance encounter on a desolate Florida highway sends him to Detroit. There he crosses paths with Clement Mansell, aka The Oklahoma Wildman, a violent, sociopathic desperado who’s already slipped through the fingers of Detroit’s finest once and aims to do so again. Mansell’s lawyer, formidable Motor City native Carolyn Wilder, has every intention of representing her client, even as she finds herself caught in between cop and criminal, with her own game afoot as well. These three characters set out on a collision course in classic Elmore Leonard fashion, to see who makes it out of the City Primeval alive.”