Making just about any movie requires physical demands of an actor, and when it comes to the horror genre, there is standard stuff expected like fried vocal chords from a day of screaming or doing lots of cardio while fleeing from a monster/killer. Parker Finn’s Smile 2, however, offered a unique challenge for star Naomi Scott, as one of her character’s frequent habits is chugging sizable bottles of water, and it was an aspect of the performance to which she fully committed.
In Smile 2, Naomi Scott’s Skye Riley explains that drinking water is part of her effort to commit to sobriety, and over the course of the movie, she does a hell of a lot of therapeutic imbibing. What made this particularly tough is that sequences where Skye downs some H2O weren’t all completed in a single take, resulting in a lot of guzzling. She pointed specifically to a continuous take sequence early in the film when Skye is in her apartment at night and the curse that has now infected her starts to terrorize her. Said Scott,
It’s one of the things I’m most proud of actually because like I basically… especially for that long oner, which was the one where the glass shatters, if you remember. I think that’s a five minute, four minute long [sequence] or however long it is. And so at the beginning of that take, I chug a whole bottle of water and we had to do that five times – and not because we did the whole thing five times because the reset was so long that we only went through it twice because the reset of the breaking glass took an hour.
The sequence in question begins with Skye drinking a glass bottle of water, putting it on the counter in her kitchen, and then discovering that the bottle has somehow fallen and shattered on the floor. The takes weren’t filmed one after the other because cameras, lighting and props had to be readjusted each time Parker Finn called cut, but each one still saw Naomi Scott throwing back some Voss. She continued,
With Parker [Finn] during that take, if it wasn’t the one, he would call cut, but it still meant that I had to keep chugging. So I chugged five of them within the space of however many hours. And I was feeling a bit like it… it’s kind of awful! . It was just awful. I was burping like mad. I was bloated, and I thought, ‘Gosh, who thought this would be one of the hard things?’
Playing the lead role in Smile 2 meant Naomi Scott not only being tormented by a grinning demon but also portraying a world famous pop star (requiring her to flex her musical and dancing skills), but in reflection, chugging a lot of water would definitely be on her list of “Challenges Faced” in the making of the film.
For what it’s worth, director Parker Finn did give her an out. She told me that he offered to come up with a workaround, but she bit the bullet as a professional:
Parker was like, ‘You know you don’t have to keep [drinking], and I was like, ‘No.’ Especially in this moment, it needs to be [real]. He was just saying, ‘If you can’t, I obviously understand,’ I was like, ‘I can and I will!’ I was very hydrated. A lot of piss. A lot of peeing. I dunno why I said a lot of piss. That sounded really terrible. (laughs)
Also starring Kyle Gallner, Lukas Gage, Ray Nicholson, Dylan Gelula, Rosemarie DeWitt, Raúl Castillo, and Peter Jacobson, Smile 2 is now playing in theaters everywhere, and after earning critical acclaim (you can read my four-star CinemaBlend review), the film topped the box office in its opening weekend.