Willa Fitzgerald was pretty fresh into her career when she landed the leading role of Emma Duval on MTV’s series adaptation of Wes Craven’s beloved film franchise, Scream. Her biggest part up until that moment was as a recurring member of the Season 6 cast of USA Network’s Royal Pains, but Scream was something else entirely. For two seasons, she led the cast through the ups and downs of drama, lies, deceit, and murder in the tiny town of Lakewood, Colorado and, together, the group tried to unmask the Lakewood Slasher.
The series gained quite a following, which is why, after two seasons, it came as a shock to fans when it was announced that the third season would travel a completely different route. Picking up the story and moving it across the country, Season 3 of Scream took place in Atlanta, Georgia and followed a new leading character, RJ Cyler’s Deion Elliot. Not only were audiences left perplexed by the sudden change, but so was Fitzgerald. Recently stopping by Collider Ladies Night to chat with Perri Nemiroff, Fitzgerald recalls the seemingly average day when she got the phone call that changed her life. She explained:
“It’s one of those funny things where I kind of still don’t know what happened. I remember it was the Spring of 2017, and we all thought we were doing Season 3 —
we had all been told we were doing Season 3.
Then I remember I was sitting in a coffee shop near Orchard Street in New York waiting to go to the eye doctor or something, and I got a call from my team, and they were like, ‘So, they’re actually not using any of the cast. They’re recasting the entire thing.’
I remember being kind of devastated
and also, at the same time, being like, ‘Okay.’ It was a hard show in a lot of ways, and we were really under a lot of pressure every season. It was kind of a pressure cooker.”
Fizgerald’s World “Exploded” After ‘Scream’ Ended
Even though Scream was over, Fitzgerald had learned so much from her leading role in the massive production that she says she felt okay about her future. At that time, the actress was in her early 20s and felt like the world was her oyster, telling Nemiroff:
“I was also at that moment in my career where
I was excited
, luckily, for a new direction and a new kind of normal for what my year looked like. Time moves so much slower when you’re in your early 20s, and I was
ready to have some change
. Then what happened next was I had to go to Ireland and do
Little Women
. Suddenly,
my world exploded in this way
. So I was very quickly proved right in a sense of being like, ‘Oh, what’s the next chapter?’ But yeah, it was wild.”
All three seasons of Scream are available for purchase on Prime Video. You can watch Fitzgerald’s full episode of Collider Ladies Night below.
