Smile 2 Director Parker Finn and Star Naomi Scott on the Challenges of Making a Worthy Sequel

This article appears in the new issue of DEN OF GEEK magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories here.

There are few things more friendly and welcoming than a smile. Or so you might have thought before the release of the hit horror movie of the same name in 2022. Now, two years after the wild success of Smile, director Parker Finn is back with a follow-up. 

“We wanted to make sure that we were coming back to do a sequel that felt really worthwhile,” Finn tells Den of Geek magazine. “We wanted to have something that felt unique and really its own thing.” Smile follows a therapist who witnesses a patient take their own life and finds herself cursed by a strange entity that manifests as strangers displaying a menacing grimace, who predict her own imminent death. It’s a neat premise, but Finn is keen not to make Smile 2 a rerun of the original.

“The challenge became an opportunity,” he says. “In the first movie, there’s a lot of mystery, and the audience is learning about it as the character is. In the second movie, they’re coming in with more knowledge than where the character is. With the audience potentially being ahead of the character, I wanted to lean into that and see if I could use that against the audience and invite them in. And I love this idea of partway through the movie if the audience might start to feel like, ‘Oh, wow, wait. Am I the evil? Am I doing this to the character?’”

The film picks up where Smile left off, but this time, our protagonist is Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), a pop sensation about to embark on a big tour when she witnesses a suicide. 

“[Naomi] sings all of the songs in the film and she does all of the choreography. She is a force of nature, a quintuple threat,” Finn says. “The most important thing for me, though, was the harrowing, dramatic journey that the character goes on.”

Scott, who is best known for playing Princess Jasmine in Disney’s live-action Aladdin, says she felt like she really understood the character of Skye when she read the script—the trauma of her past, and her fractious relationship with her mother (Rosemarie DeWitt). “It really does feel like a character piece where I get to run the gamut of emotion, and it is rooted in something that requires a grounded performance,” she says. “But then I get to go to all these just flipping unhinged places and really go for it.”

Then there are the big song-and-dance numbers that Scott performed, working with choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall. “It feels like the role that I probably needed the most prep for but got the least because of how quickly this movie came together,” Scott says. “There are pros and cons to that. Honestly, there’s something to be said for just being dropped into something and just being like, right? Go for it. Don’t overthink it.” 

Check out the film’s trailers, and you’ll see Scott decked in elaborate costumes and owning the stage in between being stalked by strangers sporting disquieting grimaces. Expressions, Finn explains, that were not enhanced with any CGI. 

“There are certain things that we do with head positioning and how we have them disconnect the smile itself from the top half of their face so that they almost have this dead-eyed stare,” he explains. “Then that’s mismatched with this too-wide smile.” We exchange “Smile” faces with Finn via Zoom. Finn’s is better. The past few years have been quite the ride for Finn, whose short Laura Hasn’t Slept (which was the genesis of Smile) played SXSW in 2020. Then, after Smile 2, he will be working on a remake of Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession, which he promises will “honor the original.”

A die-hard horror fan himself, Finn is excited for audiences to see a sequel he says is “bigger, scarier, weirder, crazier.” And that’s got to bring a smile to your face. 

Smile 2 is in theaters on Oct. 18.