The sequel is set in a small mining town which hosts the legendary Mountain Man Festival on Halloween and where crowds of costumed partygoers gather for a wild night of music and mischief. But a killer celebration soon gives way to a blood-soaked feeding frenzy when an inbred family of hillbilly cannibals trick and treat themselves to a group of visiting college students who are just dying for a good time.
Head inside for our brief chat with Bradley about his character.
Shock Till You Drop: Did Declan O’Brien, the director, do anything special to convince you to be in his sequel?
Doug Bradley: He didn’t convince me. I auditioned for it. I was in London and my agents there sent me to audition for it. And then I was here in the States when it became clear they wanted me. Declan was not aware of my pedigree of horror films. He picked my audition tape and was not aware of me until he started talking to my agents.
Shock: How was the shooting experience?
Bradley: It was very different territory, obviously, from Hellraiser and other franchises I’ve touched like Pumpkinhead and Prophecy. I’ve been saying this is my pycho hillbilly debut. [laughs] One more career box to check.
Shock: And here you’re not just a psycho hillbilly, you’re the big boss man of these three inbred brothers.
Bradley: Yes, and I only had one scene with them. Because my character gets arrested pretty early on, I spend the rest of the movie pretty much inside a prison cell. And then I escape and get re-arrested and put back in the prison. A lot of the time, the process is me in the sheriff’s cell waiting for the stooges to arrive and do their thing, which I’m confident they’re going to do. The movie is that process of them closing in on the sheriff’s office. But yes, I had the one scene with them which was shot. It was fun working with them. They were all Bulgarian actors, some didn’t speak a great deal of English, so communication was kept to a minimum.
Shock: How did you make the role exciting for you, knowing you’d spend most of your scenes in a jail cell?
Bradley: Well, I don’t know about excitement. A lot of the process is my character sitting there and waiting. Drumming his fingers and the whole time he’s telling everyone, particularly the sheriff, my boys are coming, my boys are coming… And everyone’s response is, will you shut up. And he’s great at getting on everyone’s nerves. It was the fun of the mind games was what kept it fun, I suppose. I tried to make sure my character was listening to everything going on around him. Because he’s always looking for the weakness and advantages he can touch.
Shock: Did you catch up with the franchise before you took on the job?
Bradley: I did do that. I had seen the first film, but not the rest. The series dovetails, but my character is completely new. The order of the movies…one, two and three happen in chronological order. Four is a prequel and part five is the sequel to the prequel. Nobody has any knowledge of what’s going on in the movie part from those characters who are involved in Wrong Turn 4. In talking with Declan, we didn’t talk that much about what had gone on in the other movies, we just focused on the character and script. There was a strange evening, we were shooting at the studio and there was a TV up on the wall and Wrong Turn 4 was playing. That was a strange experience, so I was able to catch up.
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