The tensions are rising along with the body count on MTV's Scream TV series, and last week at Comic-Con, Daily Dead took part in roundtable interviews with the show's cast, who discussed mixing creepy moments with comedy, the original Scream films, and much more.

Amadeus Serafini on his suspicious, new-in-town character, Kieran Wilcox:

"He's the brooding type. He is the new kid in town. He just lost his folks a few weeks back and that's the introduction to Lakewood, and he very much makes a move on Willa [Fitzgerald's] character Emma, and has a clash where it becomes a love triangle between Connor [Weil's] character, Will, Emma, and himself. That's pretty much all I can reveal for the time being and you're going to see how it unfolds over the course of this series."

Serafini on whether or not his parents' deaths were truly an accident:

"You're going to have to wait and see. In terms of what I know, yes, it is purely an accident."

Serafini on watching horror movies to prepare for the TV series:

"Of course, everyone seems to associate my character with Billy Loomis [Skeet Ulrich's character from 1996's Scream] aesthetically speaking. Connor's character is very much modeled after Stu [Matthew Lillard's role in Scream]. I've had to look at other psychopaths and sociopaths, presuming that I might be playing one, but in reality none of us know. Just the other night I watched The Silence of the Lambs again. There's so much good material to draw from.

Serafini on the cast not knowing what's going to happen down the line in the series:

"I wish they had them in stacks ready to go out, but most of this production we've been reliant on scripts coming in very last minute, so there have been re-writes upon re-writes and it has been a lot to keep up with. There have even been instances where we think that one thing is going to happen and one character will disappear and then it changes the next day, so we have this jumbled concept of what the story is. It takes a lot of time-lining ourselves into it to remember who's actually staying and who's going and so on."

John Karna on researching for his role of pop culture savvy Noah Foster, who is somewhat reminiscent of Jamie Kennedy's Randy Meeks from the Scream films:

"That's what made me love the Scream movies so much, that self-referential tone and how everyone lives in this world where we all know everything about pop culture and what's come before, especially my character.

And so when I got the part, I did so much research, especially in the horror genre and I didn't even know how much I would love horror movies until I really started watching them, it's like become this addiction, to watch a horror movie every week, that's been really fun."

Karna on partly channeling Kennedy's Randy for the TV series:

"I definitely look at him. He was so important when I was a kid, watching Jamie Kennedy's character. I loved the Scream movies and I loved Randy, but I also just love Jamie Kennedy. Malibu's Most Wanted was a huge movie for me as a kid, I thought it was hilarious. So yeah, I definitely do think about it a lot when I do the show. But it's interesting because Noah's this type of guy where it feels like he's the idealization of the way teens are these days, when they absorb so much pop culture in so many different ways, like second by second, and it never really stops anymore.

It's not just the movies that we watch, it's the TV and apps we download and the way that we use media to connect to each other. It's insane how much content is being created. And so Noah's this guys who's ingested all of it and has such a wide knowledge of it."

Karna on the pressure of meeting the same high standards of the Scream films:

"It's not so much a scary kind of pressure because the community at large loves the movies so much, they're surprisingly so supportive of anything that comes out, they just love that world and the mystery of it all. So we feel a lot of support and it's one of those things where it's such a sense of reverence for the movies and for the genre in general. We were always coming onto the set so grateful that we get to add to the history of the movie."

Willa Fitzgerald on whether or not she thinks her character, Emma Duvall, will survive and the multi-dimensional characters within the series:

"Maybe. I don't think you can really fit any of these characters into convenient archetypes. All of our show writers have done a very good job of creating characters that are not just one thing. We all have secrets. We all have lies. We all are not necessarily what we seem to be.

Fitzgerald on her love of the Scream films:

"I love all of the Scream movies. I've always been a horror fan. I came to these movies after I was already a horror fan and getting to see some movies that so perfectly play on all of the tropes of horror, it's great."

Fitzgerald on how much she's channeled Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) in her role as Emma:

"Emma starts out as a typical high school student. She has insecurities. She has anxiety. She's going through a huge life change. It's very much Sidney Prescott at the beginning, but I think over the course of the season as she's dealing with this psychopathic killer who is trying to kill her friends, she gets a lot more badass. She rises to the occasion and meets the occasion. Over the course of the season, you'll really see her transform."

Fitzgerald on the recent phone call scene that's an homage to the original film:

"You guys just saw the phone call with the killer and that was a really fun thing to shoot. It was one take that we did which is very rare. It was six pages of script and we shot it in a oner. We then obviously did different coverage but doing that was really exciting. To pay that incredible homage to the original franchise in that sequence was really fun."

On whether not knowing the identity of the killer helps or hinders her performance:

"It helps massively because you aren't tied to one idea of who the killer is. As Willa, you're constantly trying to figure out who the killer is which just makes your performance that more complex."

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  • Derek Anderson
    About the Author - Derek Anderson

    Raised on a steady diet of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps books and Are You Afraid of the Dark?, Derek has been fascinated with fear since he first saw ForeverWare being used on an episode of Eerie, Indiana.

    When he’s not writing about horror as the Senior News Reporter for Daily Dead, Derek can be found daydreaming about the Santa Carla Boardwalk from The Lost Boys or reading Stephen King and Brian Keene novels.