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Features
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Destination: Stardom
With a remake of Black Christmas and the highly anticipated ensemble piece Bobby up next, actress Mary Elizabeth Winstead would surely make her celebrated Hollywood cousin proud.
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
By Brent Simon
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New Line Cinema
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Winstead in Final Destination 3
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She may be a relative newcomer, but with Final Destination 3, Mary Elizabeth Winstead already has something Harrison Ford doesn’t have for the past six years — a movie that opened at close to $20 million. In fact, coming on the heels of a strong impression as a young Sissy Spacek in The Ring Two and her costarring turn in the Disney superhero academy flick Sky High, Winstead stands poised on the precipice of even bigger and better things.
Final Destination 3, though, marks her first front-and-center starring role. Co-written by The X-Files vets Glen Morgan and James Wong, and directed by Wong - who together also hatched the first film, but sat out the second installment, eventually opting to make the Crispin Glover creep-fest Willard instead - Final Destination 3 again deals with Death as a fated force. When graduating high school senior Wendy Christensen (Winstead) and several of her classmates get off a rollercoaster prior to its crash, the survivors think they’ve escaped. In disrupting the natural order of their passing, though, they’ve set off a chain of events that will bring about increasingly gory dispatches for each of them, unless Wendy can find a way to cheat their unfortunate destiny.
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Walt Disney Home Video
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In the DVD smash Sky High
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The filming of the movie was interesting for Winstead because it involved striking a balance between the absurd and the practical. “The gore became sort of laughable while we were filming,” says the 21-year-old actress during a recent one-on-one interview with FilmStew. “After the 50th time being splattered with strawberries and bananas all over your face (the movie’s choice recipe for pulpy brain matter, it turns out), at the end of the day you can’t take it that seriously anymore.”
Still, the bulk of Final Destination 3 takes place in such a state of heightened panic that it would be impossible for none of that to rub off and take its toll. “You’re in a constant state of fear,” Winstead admits of her role, “and because of that I would be breathing so heavy and thinking about being frightened out of my mind, that I would get light-headed. Literally, I would start spinning during certain scenes, and I almost passed out a few times.”
“But if you want it to be real, you have to really make yourself go there. So it was strange but also fun, and in the end I was glad that I got a chance to portray all those emotions.”
A distant cousin of screen legend Ava Gardner, Winstead was born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and grew up there and in Salt Lake City, Utah. While not a huge fan of movies, she always had a theatrical inclination as a youngster.
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Gregg DeGuire / Wireimage.com
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Upping the co-star ante
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“It definitely started out with a performance instinct,” says Winstead of what drew her to acting. “From a really young age I wanted to be a ballerina. I went to Geoffrey Ballet School in New York when I was 11, and after a while I felt like I wanted to try something new because I was already going to physical therapy when I was a kid.”
“I thought maybe I can channel this performance energy into something else,” she adds. “So I started taking acting classes. And I had also been doing theater and school plays. I did Romeo & Juliet when I was 10, and just loved that. It made me want to keep acting.”
Winstead came to the third installment with a certain aching familiarity of the Final Destination franchise. She was a fan, and as a 17-year-old had already auditioned for the lead role in Final Destination 2. After meeting this time with Morgan and Wong, and putting a few scenes on tape, she went almost a full, excruciating month before getting the call that she had been cast.
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Steve Granitz/Wireimage.com
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Less Moore better for Weinstead
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The duo obviously liked what they saw in Winstead, though, casting her not only in Final Destination 3, but also their next project, a re-imagination of the cult slasher flick Black Christmas, for which Winstead’s experience with screen screams will no doubt come in handy. “It’s sort of a prequel and sequel,” says Winstead of the movie, which just started lensing in Vancouver last week. “The first chunk of the film follows the childhood and back story of Billy, who is the crazed killer, and then it picks up with these girls in a sorority house in present day, and Billy comes back for a visit. There are a lot of different twists and disturbing turns and things you wouldn’t expect.”
It won’t be all terrorized screams in Winstead’s future, though. Looking forward, she also has a role in Bobby, an ensemble look at the assassination of Bobby Kennedy at Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel from writer-director Emilio Estevez’s (yes, that Emilio Estevez). With a wide-ranging cast that includes Anthony Hopkins, Demi Moore, Sharon Stone, Elijah Wood, Nick Cannon, Helen Hunt, William H. Macy, Shia LaBeouf, Freddy Rodriguez and more, the movie is sure to be a potential awards contender, and it holds a special place in Winstead’s heart.
“I really, really wanted a role in that film,” she admits candidly. “I’d met with Emilio a long time ago, and then they went on to cast all these huge names after that. And my role was supposed to be done by Mandy Moore, but at the last minute something didn’t work out with her and they said, ‘Come to work.’ So I was just so excited, because it was a film I wanted to be a part of. It was amazing and surreal on the set, to have Anthony Hopkins watching me do my scenes.”
“It’s similar to Crash, [in that] it has all these intersecting storylines,” Winstead continues. “It touches on a lot of themes that were big in that era. All the characters have these hopes that were embodied by what Robert Kennedy stood for, and it’s an important movie politically as well.”
Winstead’s storyline centers on a struggling actress trying to get an agent and get discovered. In that respect, at least, Bobby will no longer showcase life imitating art.
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