The sequel to 2020’s home invasion action-thriller Becky, The Wrath of Becky, goes bigger and bloodier (read my review here).
In the film, “Two years after she escaped a violent attack on her family, Becky attempts to rebuild her life in the care of an older woman – a kindred spirit named Elena. But when a group known as the “Noble Men” break into their home, attack them and take her beloved dog, Diego, Becky must return to her old ways to protect herself and her loved ones.”
Lulu Wilson reprises her role as the killer teen, with writers/directors Matt Angel and Suzanne Coote (The Open House) taking the reigns for this sequel.
Bloody Disgusting chatted with Wilson, Angel, and Coote after The Wrath of Becky’s world premiere at SXSW, where they spoke about the tonal shift toward humor and softening Becky just a bit. For starters, star Lulu Wilson detailed initial conversations about her character.
Wilson told us, “It was important for me to talk to Matt and Suzanne about softening up the character a little bit. I mean, one of the taglines is she’s still really fucking angry. But she is. She doesn’t start there, though, which I think is important because, in the first one, she starts at this crabby, angsty, teenage, very heavy on that. There’s still some of that because when she’s 16, it won’t go away. But it’s two years between the first and Wrath of Becky, and she’s had to do a lot of growing by herself. And learning and navigating all these crazy, very real world, very difficult things for a young woman without a family, without anything.
“She’s got a job now, and she’s got a dog, and she’s got some semblance of the guardian caretaker who kind of… a family that she was able to find and create herself, a small one. So, she’s had to drop the anger and the angst a little bit just because of her situation. But yeah, I wanted to portray that in the beginning before everyone comes in and the shit goes down because that’s the only place to really do it. I mean, it’s sprinkled throughout, but we needed it for that.”
Angel elaborates, “It was very important to Suzanne and me as well to introduce [the audience] to a new version of a familiar character. For many reasons, the most important being our favorite sequels do just that. Two years is a long time. People change in two years, especially someone with the trauma that Becky is coming off of in the first film. And so, it was important to us to go, okay, what do all great sequels have in common? They start fresh, take their time, and introduce new qualities to a familiar face. That was, first and foremost, coming at it from a human perspective. The second part of it was we wanted to do Becky 2.0 in many ways and bring in a new audience. Make this a film that could stand on its own two feet but also satisfy fans of the first film.“
Coote explains the tone of the new sequel, “As she says, she could take a gun, just boom, boom, boom. But she is Becky, and this is a fantasy world rooted in reality. It’s satire. It’s like Lulu so aptly says, it’s a comic book. She’s running around in a red jumpsuit in the middle of the day when the cops don’t exist. She can dig a hole with the tractor, and she will put a grenade in a grown-ass man. Comedy is really important.”
“Yeah, I mean, we have to earn the level of camp we go to,” Angel adds. “And that’s another reason we knew we had to ground the first act of this film. Once we’ve established the humans behind these characters, we knew that we could get away with some of the insanity around it.”
For the comedy aspects, Angel and Coote cited surprising inspiration.
Angel explains, “For us, you look at filmmakers like Edgar Wright, who was a huge inspiration in this film. You look at the incredibly under-discussed The World’s End, a film I love. That is such an incredibly human movie. They do a good job of establishing humanity, but it’s also nuts, right? It’s giant blue-blood aliens, robot things. But Edgar Wright has an incredible ability to root things in real life and find the human within the characters, and then have fun. That was big for us in order to pull off the comedy and stuff.“
The Wrath of Becky is coming soon. Stay tuned.
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