Interview: SINISTER 2 Star James Ransone on Returning for the Sequel, His Approach to Deputy So & So, and More

This Friday, Sinister 2 arrives in theaters everywhere courtesy of Gramercy Pictures. The sequel follows James Ransone’s character from the first film, Deputy So & So, as he tracks down Bughuul to an isolated farmhouse where a mother (Shannyn Sossamon) and her twin sons (Robert and Dartanian Sloan) are currently living and must stop the demonic force before it claims another family.

Daily Dead had an opportunity to speak with Ransone earlier this week about returning for another Sinister, becoming a main character for the sequel, collaborating with director Ciarán Foy as well as his co-stars. Ransone also offered some hilarious insight into his process as an actor and even chatted with us about his time working on The Wire.

Thanks for speaking with me today, James—you were great in the film and it’s cool to see how the Deputy has evolved since the first Sinister. How much fun was it for you to return and see how Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill opened up your character for Sinister 2? 

James Ransone: I was just flattered that they thought I could be the lead in the movie [laughs]. It's like, "Oh, okay. All right, sure," and then my second thought following that was, "Oh, fuck. How am I going to stretch this out into a full-fledged character?" I’m the ridiculous, comedic relief from the first one and so this time it's got to take on another dimension in the second one. So I just knew that it was going to require some new responsibilities.

And to be honest, my process as an actor—I'm like the biggest rip-off artist of all-time. I'm not a method actor in the least bit. I'm a total con man, because the first Sinister was just me paying homage to Chris Farley in The Chris Farley Show from Saturday Night Live. So if you watched the first Sinister, and you just watched my performance, I swear to God, it is me doing a really terrible impression of Chris Farley in The Chris Farley Show. I thought, "Oh my God, this isn't going to work for the sequel," so what I did for the sequel—and again, total rip-off, con-man bullshit—I tried to take Charlie Chaplin in City Lights and turn that into a character in a horror movie.

I spoke to Ciarán last week and he mentioned that he saw your character as the "audience" for Sinister 2. Were you conscious of that going into the film and did you incorporate that into your approach at all?

James Ransone: Well, I think by the "audience," he means that, in a horror movie, an audience is always going to be smarter than the character on the screen. It's like, "Why are you going in there, idiot?" And Deputy So & So is the audience. It means that he knows better, and he's got to do it anyway. He's right there with the audience, and it's like, "I should not be going up these stairs. This is a terrible idea, but I have to." That's what Ciarán meant by me being the audience. It's a ridiculous concept to think that a human being would just so blindly take on some evil, supernatural force that's so much stronger than they are and think that they're going to win.

And as far as my approach, I know sometimes directors will have you do backstories, but I'm super lazy [laughs]. Any actor that does that stuff, they're just wasting their time coming up with busy work for themselves to do. If a director wants me to have a backstory, I'm not opposed to that, but no, I think doing stuff like that can sometimes be a hindrance to stuff you might be coming up with in performance.

For me, it was more like you take some bad shit that happens to you in your real life that you might not really want to think about or talk about, and you just try to reveal it when you're making a character. I'm just drawing from my own real-life experiences, because that's all I have to be able to flesh any of this stuff out. Do I do it well? I have no idea. I don't know if it works or not, but that's the only place I can come from.

How was it working with Ciarán?

James Ransone: It was great. He's a real man. It was a hard shoot. It was a rough shoot and not a lot of days, and we had weather problems and some set problems, and it was rough. He was like Cool Hand Luke about the whole thing. You need to be pretty diplomatic when you're a director, because there are a lot of things that are coming at you, where you could lose your cool over it, and he never lost his cool once.

Then I saw the movie recently, and I was fucking blown away, to be honest. He was doing scenes that I wasn't involved in, and I was just super impressed with them stylistically. It made me realize there's always the danger—with these sequels and these horror movies—they're just doing so much worse than the first. The audience is actually going to be pretty surprised, because I was really surprised, too. I was like, "Oh my God, there's some really interesting things happening in this movie stylistically that I had no idea were going to be in there."

Something else I enjoyed was the way you bond with Shannyn's character. Other than your adoration for Ethan's character in the first Sinister, that relationship is kind of like the deputy's only real, human connection in the series.

James Ransone: Oh yeah, she's so great and has this lovely, ethereal presence. It's hard to not gravitate towards her lightness. A lot of that just came from that energy; she was just real easy to work with on this.

I wanted to ask, because I know you've done a lot of really cool stuff on TV over the years in addition to being in films these days, do you feel like now you're just focusing on the feature side of things in your career? 

James Ransone: Oh, hell no. No way. No, man, there's no money in that shit. I did four movies last year, and it was the least I've made in five years [laughs]. But listen, to be totally honest, the day of that type of actor is dead. Thinking that there's a difference between a film actor and a TV actor, there's no such thing. Honestly, just for me—and this is totally my position in it—it's more like who can I work with that's really cool? Beyond that, I don't care what medium they're working in. I really don't, whether it's TV or film or even a web series, it's more like, is this person making something cool? Is this thing cool and what's my involvement in it?

In relation to that, I was hoping you could talk a bit about your time working on The Wire, arguably one of the greatest television series ever. How much did that experience change your life and is it amazing that it’s still a show that people discuss regularly?

James Ransone: That show opened the doors for everything else that I've done in terms of anything that would have any commercial appeal. That was my first foray into having a legit career. I wouldn't have worked with Spike Lee, so I wouldn't have been in Inside Man had it not been for The Wire, so David Simon gave me my break. David and Ed [Burns] and Alexis Vogel really took a chance on me, and that's what opened the doors for me.

However, I will say that the reason the show is so monumentally successful is because HBO left them alone, basically. David works for really cheap, and he comes in on time and under budget, and they didn't really put their fingerprints all over it. That's why the show is so good, and that's why people like Louie so much, because Louis (C.K.) goes, "I'm making my show. You don't get to have any say in how it comes out, who goes in it, what it's like, no matter what. I'm going to give it to you when I'm done, and you're going to put it on the air, and I'm going to make it for cheap."

And that's the problem with content now, is that there's this impulse of the networks and the executives and the corporations to want to get their fingerprints all over it by trying to quantify audience expectations. Inevitably, what you end up doing is ruining it once you start thinking about how you're going to commercialize it. It becomes this bland, digestible thing that you forget about.

If you want something that really touches you, then allow someone with a singular voice to be able to present it to you. That's the bigger problem, studios stepping in and saying, "Okay, how can we scale back, cut back a lot of these budgets, and then just leave the filmmakers and the creators themselves to just go make their thing, and then we'll just watch it when they're done.”

It's terrifying. The reason, when you're like, “The Wire is so good,” it's because no one fucked with David and Ed while they were making it. They just let them make their show.

[Possible spoiler] Before we go, I was curious if you’d be up for potentially battling Bughuul one more time if everything goes well with Sinister 2—have you given it any thought or are you just waiting to see how it goes on this one?  

James Ransone: Honestly, I will literally be the last person to know if that happens [laughs]. I’ll be the last name on the call sheet and all that. It would be fun to come back again, but they don’t involve me in those discussions—they never tell me anything [laughs].

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"The sequel to the 2012 sleeper hit horror movie. In the aftermath of the shocking events in “Sinister,” a protective mother (Shannyn Sossamon of “Wayward Pines”) and her 9-year-old twin sons (real-life brothers Robert and Dartanian Sloan) find themselves in a rural house marked for death as the evil spirit of Bughuul continues to spread with frightening intensity."

Directed by Ciarán Foy and written by Scott Derrickson & C. Robert Cargill, Sinister 2 stars James Ransone, Shannyn Sossamon, Lea Coco, Robert and Dartanian Sloan.