ORPHAN: FIRST KILL Star Isabelle Fuhrman Says She Was "Thoroughly Disturbed" By Her Appearance in the Prequel
It’s pretty crazy that we are getting a prequel film to Orphan 12 years after the original movie was released and actress Isabelle Fuhrman came back to reprise her role. She is 24 years old now and she is playing a younger 9-year-old version of the character she played in the original movie when she was 12. How weird is that!?
In order to pull that off in Orphan: First Kill, it was explained that the filmmakers utilized “a combination of forced perspective shooting and a world-class makeup team.” In a recent interview with THR, Fuhrman talks about the results, of that and says that she was “thoroughly disturbed.” She said:
"I love the challenge of being able to play a kid because that's never historically been done in cinema -- I was like looking all this up, because I love looking up old movie history and things like that, and I was like, 'Oh, an adult has never reprised the role that they played as a child,. Will Smith, for example, recently did that movie [Gemini Man] where they de-age somebody, but to reprise a role that you literally did as a kid as an adult has never been done before. It's kind of impossible. And we did it. We didn't use special effects, we didn't use any crazy makeup tricks. And I think that's what makes the movie work, is because you really can't figure out how I look like a [nine-year-old], but I do. And it's really creepy.
"I was there every day. I know how we did this. I know all the tricks, and I'm so thoroughly disturbed right now, because I somehow am nine years old again, and it doesn't make any sense ... I was like, 'How do I revisit this part and then also convincingly play a kid?' Because that was the easy part last time, the hard part was trying to be an adult. Now the hard part is I have to be kid."
I can’t wait to see how this looks and how they actually pulled this off. The film was directed by William Brent Bell (The Boy and The Devil Inside) and the story centers on Leena, “a murderous sociopath who looks like a child due to a medical condition. Following an escape from an Estonian psychiatric facility, Leena comes to America by impersonating the missing daughter of a wealthy Connecticut family. But Leena’s new life as ‘Esther’ comes with an unexpected wrinkle and pits her against a mother who will protect her family at any cost.”
Julia Stiles also stars as the mother in the film with Rossif Sutherland, Matthew Finlan and Hiro Kanagawa rounding out the cast.