Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire has a whole lot of characters it’s juggling, and one of the essential wasn’t even truly within the movie’s advertising and marketing. That may be Melody, performed by Gossip Lady’s Emily Alyn Lind, a 16-year-old who shortly strikes up a friendship with McKenna Grace’s Phoebe Spengler. The twist? She’s a ghost pressured to remain on Earth till she finds a option to reunite along with her household on the opposite aspect.
In a current Hollywood Reporter interview, Lind revealed that her ghost standing was one thing even she didn’t find out about till she’d locked down the function. Director Gil Kenan by no means explicitly stated as such throughout their talks, and contours like “I get it. I’m like 100 years outdated,” she simply assumed that translated to Melody being an outdated soul. As for why it was saved secret, she reasoned it got here from her character being “a unique type of ghost” for the collection. As a substitute of being purely chaotic or malevolent, Melody’s “a ghost with a coronary heart,” just like Ghost Egon in Ghostbusters: Afterlife. “[She] has a full human relationship, so I believe that there was part of them that actually wished to catch folks off guard in that sense.”
Within the movie, Melody’s caught in limbo after her household died in a home hearth she personally feels liable for. Her decisions within the movie all stem from that survivor’s guilt, and Lind was frannk in saying she’s glad her character noticed the error of her methods: for one factor, attending to workforce with the OG and new Ghostbusters on the finish had her “so giddy,” and he or she beloved sharing the display screen with collection veterans like Ernie Hudson and Annie Potts. Nevertheless it additionally meant people wouldn’t depart the theater calling for her head, “similar to they’ve hated me in different movies for fucking the story up.”
As for Melody and Phoebe’s friendship and all of the subtext within the film, Lind referred to as their dynamic certainly one of “two souls connecting.” Whereas she acknowledged elements of it may be learn as romantic—and that Phoebe wished a closeness with somebody—each characters are “nonetheless two children in a whole lot of methods. They’re lower from the identical fabric and ousiders in their very own methods. […] And now they’re connecting on this grandiose degree in two completely different dimensional planes, and so they’re simply making an attempt to determine this world collectively. I like that we didn’t outline it as one factor or one other. Generally, when folks do this, it ruins it. It’s too concrete and absolute, and so they’re so not absolute as characters.”
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is now taking part in in theaters.
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