Scream 5: Neve Campbell Confirms She’s in Talks to Return

It looks like Neve Campbell's Sidney Prescott will make an appearance in Scream 5

The Scream franchise’s leading lady has revealed that she’s hoping to return for the fifth instalment. The new ‘reboot’ was announced in March, with THR noting that Ready or Not directors Matthew Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett were attached to the project.

Campbell has inhabited the lead role of Sidney Prescott in all four of the late Wes Craven‘s Scream movies. The original 1996 movie saw the character hunted by a masked figure – Ghostface – as she dealt with lingering family trauma in a high school setting that she was increasingly out of touch with, and in 2011, it looked like Campbell might be bidding farewell to the horror series as Sidney returned to her hometown on the 15th anniversary of the original Woodsboro massacre in Scream 4, but she remained the franchise’s final girl until the end.

It seems that Sidney may need to watch out for “one last scare”…

“They’ve come to me and we’re having conversations,” the actress told Jake Hamilton (via Bloody Disgusting). “It’s a little hard at the moment because of COVID to know when that’ll happen and hopefully we can see eye to eye on all the elements that have to come into place for it to happen”

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She went on to explain, “I originally had been really apprehensive about doing another Scream without Wes because he was such a genius and he is the reason they are what they are but the directors have come to me with such a great appreciation for Wes’s work and they really want to honor it and that meant a lot to me,” adding “Hopefully we’ll be able to do it.”

Up until this point, it was unclear whether Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett’s Scream project would completely reboot the concept of the films, or whether it might be a continuation of the story. Barring the possibility of Campbell only popping back up in a cameo role in Scream 5, it now seems like the latter is more likely.

The Wild Things and The Craft star famously took a big step away from Hollywood at the end of the 00s, which she addressed in 2018 on The Late Show.

“Ten years ago you had the world on a string,” Stephen Colbert said. “And then you left. You went to London. Why don’t you like us, Neve Campbell?”

Campbell indicated that she found the combination of her post-Scream fame and the rush to typecast her in more genre roles mentally and emotionally draining.

“I needed a minute,” she explained of her sudden move. “In my 20s, it all hit so fast and so big that it was a little overwhelming. Wonderful, obviously, and I’m very grateful for it, but it got to a level, also, where the kinds of things that I was being offered were not the things I wanted to do. I was constantly being offered horror films, because I was known for horror films, or bad romantic comedies.”

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“I just wasn’t interested in the scripts and I was feeling a bit unhappy with the things that were coming to me and I was feeling a little bored of the whole thing and I thought, ‘I want a change.'”

We’ll bring you more on Scream 5 as it develops.