Melissa Barerra says that her one-woman thriller showing of sorts in Netflix‘s Keep Breathing influenced her approach to the upcoming Scream sequel.
The six-episode limited series, with episodes that clock in at just over a half-hour, centers on a New York lawyer named Liv– the lone survivor of a private plane crash in the Canadian frontier who “must battle both an unforgiving wilderness and past personal traumas to stay alive.”
“The idea of it being a one-woman show mostly was part of what attracted me to it,” Barrera told Shadow and Act. “It felt like a challenge and it felt like a role that I could really dig into. And once I read the scripts, I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I have to do this.’ It was so beautifully written…a dream role for me, because it’s the perfect balance of physicality and the emotional driving force of, of the story. I just thought this is the kind of role that I’ve always wanted to do. I didn’t think much about it until I got it, and then, when I got it, I got scared, because I was like, ‘This is gonna be me…all the time.’ [laughs] And that’s intimidating and terrifying, but also exciting. It was a little bit of a roller coaster of emotions.”
Because the series provided these challenges, Barerra says she took a lot of this and applied it to her netx projects, including Scream 6.
“While shooting this, I learned a lot about myself as an actor and the places that I can go and how I can stretch myself [as far as] what I need and I don’t need as an actor, because acting by yourself– it’s some it’s a new muscle,” shhe explained. “Having no seen partners for so long aisa new muscle and it just allows you to be really present. I feel like that feeling [of being] that relaxed in front of the camera is something that I learned in this show that I have now taken on to the next projects that I’ve done after. [And] just like being able to like be, because sometimes actors [are] very relaxed when you’re rehearsing. Then as soon as they say action, you like kind of tense up because you feel like you have to be on. And I find the most compelling performances are the more the more relaxed ones. That’s something that I learned on this show and I’ve tried to keep exercising in my next work.”
Watch the full interview below:
