FINAL DESTINATION 5 directed by Steven Quale, written by Eric Heisserer, with Nicholas D’Agosto, Emma Bell, Jacqueline MacInnes Wood and Tony Todd. A Warner Bros. release. 95 minutes. Opens Friday (August 12). See listing
Jacqueline Macinnes Wood has built a substantial fan following in the last three years on The Bold And The Beautiful. But thanks to the Final Destination 5 trailer that’s been playing in theatres for the past few months, millions of people now know her as Eyeball Girl.
In the trailer, Eyeball Girl – actually called Olivia, who has survived a bridge collapse along with several workmates and is now being stalked by Death – has been prepped for laser eye surgery when she finds herself alone, immobilized and at the mercy of a malfunctioning device. And because this is a Final Destination trailer, the audience is encouraged to root for her horrific death.
Don’t worry. She’s cool with it.
“I knew what I was getting myself into,” says the 24-year-old Windsor native, in Toronto on a Canadian press tour. “The cast, we’re all so competitive – we’re like, ‘My death is better.’ ‘No, my death is better.’ But you know, we like to see people die. It’s a twisted thing: there’s that point when you wanna root for them, but essentially we wanna see them die.”
I have to agree. That’s the sort of catharsis horror movies are designed to provide. But even so, there’s a level of squick to Eyeball Girl’s sequence that really gets under your skin. Malcolm McDowell suffered what he described as exquisite pain after scratching his corneas shooting the famous projection-room scene in A Clockwork Orange did MacInnes Wood have a similar experience?
“I shot [the scene] from 6 pm until 9 o’clock in the morning,” she says, “and that speculum was probably in and out of my eye 60, 70 times. You keep numbing the eye, but after a while…. That fear, everything – that’s real. That’s exactly how I was feeling. There were times when I was trying to get to an emotional place – I was in a head vise, too – and the thing popped out of my eye. I didn’t have any scrapes, maybe just one little tiny one, but I could handle it.”
A fan of the series since she saw the first film as a kid, MacInnes Wood jumped at the chance to die a grisly death.
“I was working on my show and found out they were auditioning,” she says. “So I put it on tape at 6 in the morning – I couldn’t get in [to read] because I was just shooting like crazy – and I found out by lunch that they wanted me.”
Once she was on the set, did she ever think of asking the producers to spare her character and kill someone else’s?
“I want all of them to die,” she says, laughing. “Because I’m horrible.”
Interview Clips
Jacqueline MacInnes Wood on the appeal of the Final Destination movies:
MacInnes Wood on bringing the work home:
MacInnes Wood on how the actors entertained each other on the set:
MacInnes Wood on her unpredictable career path:
normw@nowtoronto.com
