Freaky Tales, which premiered back in 2024 at the Sundance Film Festival, is finally out now, and one thing people have been waiting for is Normani’s feature film debut with the project. She stars opposite Pedro Pascal, Jay Ellis, Ben Mendelsohn, Dominique Thorne, the late Angus Cloud and more.

The singer wasn’t approached for the Lionsgate film but rather auditioned like countless others for the role, according to directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck.

“She came in to audition like a lot of other people, and she just had this great presence,” Fleck said in a recent interview with Blavity’s Shadow and Act. “The camera loves her and she’s a performer. So she had never acted before, but she was very comfortable performing, obviously. And so it was great to have her comfortable on stage with a microphone. She could handle all that with grace and presence. But beyond that, the acting stuff, just quiet moments where she’s looking at herself in a mirror or just feeling anxiety about her life and the things going on in her life. She doesn’t have to say a lot to express so much. And I think it’s a really beautiful quality she has.”

“She has such depth, and it really comes across,” Boden said. “And I hope that her fans see a new side of her. She shows in this movie that she can do so much more than be a musician and perform. I mean, she can really bring it in terms of acting. And I just want to say we have a dream cast for this and we feel so lucky.”

What is ‘Freaky Tales’ about?

The film, which has an anthology format, is set in 1987 Oakland where “a multi-track mixtape of colorful characters — an NBA star, a corrupt cop, a female rap duo, teen punks, neo-Nazis, and a debt collector — [are] on a collision course in a fever dream of showdowns and battles.”

How did the directors approach making an indie film with big ambitions?

Boden explained, “We kept having to remind financiers when we were getting the money to make this [that], ‘We come from indie filmmaking. We know how to make a dollar go really far. Trust us. This is in our wheelhouse. We know what the expectations are for making an indie film. We know how to be scrappy. We know how to do things quickly.’ And this was certainly a very, very ambitious indie film, the most ambitious indie film that we’d ever done. But I think that some of the tools that we’d gained from Captain Marvel in terms of just having more experience with action, having more experience with visual effects, not just Captain Marvel, but also the [Apple TV+ series] Masters of the Air kind of prepared us to do this. And then our experience working with indie films like Half Nelson and Sugar kind of prepared us for the run-and-gun nature of it.”

Fleck explained how they resisted turning the film into episodic television, adding, “There were some people that read the script though and urged us to turn it into a television series [and said] it could potentially make more money. And we were very much like, ‘No, this is a movie. This is a movie, like Creepshow, like Pulp Fiction, like Mystery Train. This is going to be a movie.’ And we stuck to it.”

How do Pedro Pascal and Jay Ellis fit into the film’s story?

Aside from Normani, Boden and Fleck spoke about the other stars such as Pascal and Ellis, the former of whom had his role interconnected through the entire film. His character, Clint, is a fictional character and not a story rooted in real-life events like most of the film.

“Pedro’s character, as we were writing, he was a completely fictional character that was kind of based more off of our love of movies in the 1980-like archetypical, kind of B-movie characters from that time,” Boden said. “He was kind of created in order that he was a tie that was starting to tie those other chapters together. And honestly, as we were writing, we just loved that character so much that we started to grow him into his own chapter. That’s why he ties all the chapters together, is that that was almost his purpose. He just became such an interesting character in and of himself that we gave him his own little story and his own life and he became like our ’80s B-movie/VHS video store kind of subculture.”

What genre twist does Jay Ellis’ segment bring?

As for Ellis, for his section of the movie, the film turns into a blaxploitation-esque, fun slasher.

“It was awesome,” said Fleck. “It was really fun to write, first of all. And Jay was so committed. He was the first person we went to and he was in from the beginning. And he was so committed to the training, to just making it look awesome. And we worked with a stunt coordinator, his name is Ron Yuan. And basically we had ideas and he would share ideas with us, and it was really collaborative and we just thought of fun ways that… fun gags that could go down in that sequence.”

Freaky Tales is in theaters now.