“How the hell is Stu Macher back?”
If that’s a question that you’ve asked once if not repeatedly in the last year, you are most definitely not alone. There are a lot of big unknowns about director Kevin Williamson’s Scream 7, but that one sits right at the top of the list, as the Matthew Lillard character very clearly died in the original Scream. Now, we are less than one month away from finally getting an answer to the big mystery – and while that’s tremendously exciting, the actor admits that the whole enterprise has filled him with plenty of agita.
Lillard has been working very hard in recent months to keep all of Scream 7’s secrets, going as far as to not even tell his family what happens in the upcoming horror movie, and while there has been plenty of excitement, he also tells Entertainment Weekly that there has been a fair amount of stress as well. Stu Macher, the original Ghostface along with Skeet Ulrich’s Billy Loomis from Wes Craven’s Scream, is one of the standout roles that the man has played in his career, and he knows that he is potentially messing with his legacy by being involved. He explained,
There was so much anxiety, so much fear, so much insecurity about stepping back into something that, frankly — and it’s yet to be determined — could go really poorly. I mean, if people hate the movie, hate me, hate Stu, question why I came back, all of that weighs on me heavily… It’s a gamble of legacy. I wouldn’t want to hurt the legacy at all. And if I thought it would, I wouldn’t be here.
When we last saw Stu, he was in the living room of his house… and he wasn’t doing so hot. Case in point: we couldn’t even see his face, as Neve Campell’s Sidney Prescott smashed his head open with a television. Technically it’s true that Matthew Lillard is also in Scream 2, but he is merely featured as an uncredited extra, and Scream 7 promises to be something totally different.
For what it’s worth, while Matthew Lillard’s return as Stu has earned a lot of buzz, he’s not the only legacy star who is said to be coming back from the dead for the next installment in the slasher franchise, as there have also been reports that the movie will feature David Arquette as Dewey Riley (who died in Scream VI) and Scott Foley as Roman Bridger (who met his maker in Scream 3). The context of their respective returns is being kept secret for now, but in the case of Lillard at the very least, he was willing to do anything that Kevin Williamson – the screenwriter behind the original film – asked him to do. Lillard told EW,
I will say this: It didn’t really matter to me in what capacity Kevin wanted me to come back. At the end of the day, I think the reason I was so excited about it was ’cause I had been fighting to come back. I was openly campaigning for years.
Also featuring franchise stars Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, Jasmin Savoy Brown and Mason Gooding, Scream 7 is just a few weeks away from spilling all of its secrets and is set to arrive in theaters on February 27.
