‘Thanksgiving’ – Nell Verlaque and Milo Manheim on Slasher Kills and Collaborating with Eli Roth

A new holiday horror classic emerged this season with the arrival of Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving, now playing in theaters and on PVOD. 

In Thanksgiving, “After a Black Friday riot ends in tragedy, a mysterious Thanksgiving-inspired killer terrorizes Plymouth, Massachusetts – the birthplace of the infamous holiday.” 

Roth directed from a script he co-wrote with Jeff Rendell. 

For the slasher’s surprise PVOD drop, Bloody Disgusting spoke with actors Nell Verlaque, who plays final girl, Jessica, and Milo Manheim as Ryan, Jessica’s love interest. The pair shared their experiences working on Roth’s slasher, ensuring that their characters were authentic and their favorite kills in the film.

In a previous chat with Roth, the director spoke of enlisting help from actual teenagers when it came to penning his high school characters. Verlaque reveals that the cast also pitched in when it came to maintaining authenticity.

“I’m laughing because we so did, so much,” Verlaque says of collaborating with Roth. “Thank god Eli is Eli. I would go to him and say, ‘The thing is, girls in high school don’t actually just talk about lip gloss.’ And he would be like, ‘Oh, so you’re saying a 50-year-old man doesn’t know what girls in high school talk about?’ I would say ‘No.’ Then, he would say, ‘You’re right. That’s why we need you to say that, so thank you.’ So, he was really great about accepting those notes, and it made it more authentic, so I’m glad.”

Manheim shares that it wasn’t just dialogue that the cast collaborated on; Roth sought input on the music the characters liked, too. 

“To open the movie, the song that you guys are singing in the car,” Manheim says to Verlaque, “I think was a suggestion from Tomaso [Sanelli] or Gabe [Davenport] or something. We were just like Duke Deuce. That’s such a perfect thing for them to be listening to, which Eli accepted and was open about.”

While Verlaque loved the physical aspect of playing Jessica, it was the personal relationships among the characters that she took greater care in fostering to ensure the friendships on screen felt real.

“I had a good time developing a backstory for my relationships with everyone, and I hope that it made them very specific,” she tells Bloody Disgusting. “This felt like a personal touch in a way because I remember with Gabe, who plays Scuba, they have a really sweet friendship, and they go through this together and come out together. Gabe and I did a lot on our own outside of that to make sure that that relationship came through. I think there are always little things that you try to add yourself and develop outside of work so that it comes through in your characters.“

Manheim’s Ryan had a trickier arc as the seemingly sweet love interest with a darker side that places him firmly on the suspect list. The actor credits Roth’s direction for bringing that out of his performance.

He explains, “I think that just goes to show how genius Eli is. He’s really playing mental chess with all of us, and I think that the movie we saw is not really the movie we expected. I don’t know; I thought it was going to be a lot scarier than it is. It’s really disgusting, and it’s funny. When I auditioned for the role, he had me do it like a psycho, and I was screaming. I booked the role in that audition, so I thought to myself, ‘This is exactly what I need to do. I’m crazy. I’m nuts, and they’re not going to like him.’ And then I get to set, and he’s like, ‘You’re a really sweet guy, and we really root for you.’ My world kind of exploded, and I was like, ‘I had practiced it this way.’ I think through that, through me trying to be nice but not really being able to get there fully because that’s not where my head was at. We created this sort of untrustworthy element in Ryan, and I think that’s really Eli. Eli did so many things to really sculpt the feeling of each character, whether we knew it or not. So yeah, I liked being that little red herring though. They never say it in the script. You have to create that vibe for yourself.”

The pair, both horror fans, also picked favorites when it came to the feast of gory kills in Thanksgiving. If you haven’t yet seen the film, consider this a spoiler warning.

Verlaque didn’t hesitate to reveal her favorite Thanksgiving kill: “Okay, that’ll take a while. Just kidding. Tim Dillon’s. I love that they used the cat. It was the first kill that I wasn’t on set for, so I hadn’t seen it. So, I got to see it for the first time, and I was dying, and I just thought the anticipation was great. The cat was great. That cat should get an Oscar, and Milo, you go.”

Manheim obliges, “I think that when I read the script, I was so excited to see Yulia’s death. It did it justice and more, but I think I’m kind of with you. The way things translate from script to real life surprised me, and I think Tim Dillon really, and the cat, made that death special. And Tomaso’s at the end, too, just because of how much time and prep needs to go into something like that.”

The actors also touched on the climactic Thanksgiving dinner. Specifically, they reveal how Roth purposefully kept the cast in the dark until it was time to film the gruesome scene.

“They hid all of the prosthetics, specifically for the dinner scene where we all sit down and we see all of these people who have been killed,” Verlaque shares. “They hid them in a room and had a sign on the door that said, ‘Do not go in.’ Of course, if I see a sign on a door that says that, I go right in. There was a guy there who was like, ‘Get out.’ I didn’t know what was going on, and then I realized that that’s where they were holding all of the heads and all of the bodies. By the time it came for us to shoot, all of those were so real, and they’re so good at what they do that you feel like you’re opposite these real people with these horrific things that have happened to them. So it was so much fun to get to do that.

While Ryan wasn’t at the forefront of this grisly scene, Manheim was excited to observe. He joked, “I mean, to be honest, in the movie, my character doesn’t experience too much of that, but Milo got to experience all of that because I was there as much as I could be. The dinner scene is the only day that I left because I was kind of feeling sick, I think because of the performances, especially Rick Hoffman. I was listening to it on a monitor, and I took my headphones off, and in the distance, I just heard screams, and it was just chilling. That room, I actually never went in that room because, to be honest, there is a naked body prosthetic in there of somebody in the cast, and I was like, ‘I don’t want to cross any boundaries there.’ However, I appreciated every single prosthetic that I saw. The parade with the ship? I was there for that. I got to watch that in real time, those two little girls. That was a memorable death in the moment for me.”

Thanksgiving is now available in theaters and PVOD, and you can watch an exclusive “Behind the Screams” featurette for even more slasher fun.

 

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