Finn Wolfhard and McKenna Grace didn’t know they were auditioning for Ghostbusters
The Stranger Things and I, Tonya stars on living with ghosts and becoming Egon Spengler
Film Features Finn Wolfhard
Given the nature of leaks these days, it’s understandable that even stars’ auditions might have to be kept under a veil of secrecy. That’s what happened with Ghostbusters: Afterlife. Stars Finn Wolfhard (Stranger Things) and McKenna Grace (I, Tonya) said they had no idea what they were auditioning for until after they landed the gig, though Wolfhard concedes, “I knew that it was a big movie.”
Grace agrees, telling The A.V. Club in the video interview above that it’s not all that unusual a process for her. “I’ve had that happen a lot where I go out for things and I don’t know what it is whatsoever,” she says. “They’ll give me either an insert from the script or something from a film that’s already out. I remember I had to audition with a scene from Moonrise Kingdom one time.”
Grace, who plays Egon Spengler’s lookalike granddaughter Phoebe in the movie, was so completely transformed into a child-version of Harold Ramis for the film that even her own grandmother didn’t recognize her.
“She watched the trailer and she called my mom and was like, ‘I just saw the Ghostbusters trailer,’” Grace says. “We were like, ‘Yeah? What did you think?’ She said, ‘I liked it, but I didn’t see McKenna.’ One of the first shots of the trailer is me looking out the window, so I was like, “Well, watch it again.’”
She also told us that one of her “favorite and least favorite” moments from making the film came when she was hanging out on set. “I was waiting outside of crafty, I was standing there… on the sidewalk. They were like, ‘Can somebody just move this little boy out of the way?’,” saying she then turned and ran.
Ghostbusters: Afterlife hits theaters this Friday, November 19. You can read our review of the movie, which we called “a dispiriting nostalgia exercise,” right here. You can also check out our interview with Wolfhard and Grace’s co-stars Carrie Coon and Paul Rudd right here, and you should, because they’re great.
6 Comments
No matter how many things I see him in, I always feel like someone named ‘Finn Wolfhard’ should really be a Nordic-themed pro wrestler with ‘Immigrant Song’ as his entrance music.
Either that or he’s a friend of Thor’s.
Not Finnish enough, perhaps some Amorphis instead.
Gwen asked about McKenna changing her hair to play a brunette… but she’d already done that in The Haunting of Hill House (although that seemed to be just a dye job without much other change).
Judging by Thimothée, Kodi Smit-McPhee, and Finn here – all male teen stars are now 6’2, 110lbs. What is causing the lankification of America’s youth?!
America’s youth aren’t “lankifying.” Like the rest of America, they just keep getting fatter and fatter. Hollywood, on the other hand, continues to populate their movies almost exclusively with skinny people, unless you’re talking about comic relief or villains (and even then, we’re mostly talking about the comic relief henchmen).