Christina Hendricks is an American actress best known for her role as Joan Holloway on AMC’s television show Mad Men. She has appeared on multiple films and TV shows including Drive, Firefly, and Rick and Morty. Christina was recently in The Strangers: Prey at Night, as Cindy, a wife and mother whose family is attacked by mask killers.
The Strangers: Prey at Night is a sequel to 2008’s American horror film The Strangers. Inspired by true events, The Strangers tells the story of a dating couple that are visited by a masked woman. After sending her away, the couple are attacked by the woman and two other masked killers. The three masked killers return in The Strangers: Prey at Night. This time they attack a family of four. A married couple and their two children.
When talking about The Strangers and what sets it apart from other horror films, Christina said:
Then Christina talked about what motivated her to join the sequel:
“I think the key is because it preys on my biggest fear. It’s just someone messing with you about the neighborhood. Cause that could happen. To me the devil’s not coming down tomorrow. And ghosts aren’t going to pop out of my carpet. It’s just some random weirdo just wanting to mess with us all because they can. To me that could happen. It’s just like the scariest. It’s that fear of going to close your windows at night kind of stuff. That could happen.”
Stories have come out of Christina getting very scared on set. She explained, “It’s really, you know, I’m the first to go. So, up until that point, it’s really just a family drama. There’s nothing to get scared of up until that point.” Christina continued with:
“I said yes early, not officially, officially, but before I even read it. Because I loved the first one so much. To me, it was a cult classic. Because I like the genre, I was very picky about what I wanted to do within the genre. Cause they’re not all great and they do kind of blur together sometimes. I watch so many of them, that I go, is that the one where…? You forget which ones which.”
Christina said she eventually got used to the scares. Three times filming the same frightening scene was the limit. She wanted to get the scary scenes filmed before they stopped being terrifying. To keep the surprise fresh, Christina even asked the rehearsals to be toned down. “I said, let me not see her, even during rehearsal. Let her not wear the mask. Because the mask really scared me.”
“You really do have to put yourself in that place of fear. You have to live it out in order to be convincing. To do the job justice. You can rehearse. And you can say, now she’ll bang down the door and she’ll call to you. Yeah, yeah, technical, technical. But until someone is banging through the door with a statue with a mask on, you just don’t know what that’s going to feel like. And it feels like hell (LAUGHS). The scariest thing you can imagine.
“And you’re on adrenaline and you’re screaming. And trying to get out of the room from this thing. And it just felt incredibly real to me. I scared the hell out of myself, or she scared the hell out of me. Naturally, I was sort of devastated for a moment. When they said cut, I started to cry-laugh.”
MORE: Watch The Strangers 2 Trailer
The Strangers: Prey at Night is available digitally and on Blu-ray.
