When filming concluded on Happy Death Day Israel Broussard thought that he would never have to see the plaid shirt that his character Carter repeatedly wore ever again.
However, he didn’t realize the trick that its director Christopher Landon had planned for the follow-up, which sees Jessica Rothe’s Tree return to the exact same day where she has to die over and over again, but this time in a different dimension, where Broussard is wearing the same shirt.
“I would burn that plaid shirt,” Broussard tells Metro, while Landon admits that it was a “miserable” experience having to recreate the scenes from the original for the follow-up.
Why some of Happy Death Day 2U’s production was miserable
“At the end of shooting this movie everyone wanted to smash their head against a wall,” he insists. “Because everything was about trying to recreate something that they saw from the first movie. Every department had to somehow figure that out. It was crazy. For location we had used a hospital in New Orleans. We wanted to just go back and shoot at the hospital. But they had gutted the hospital. So we had to rebuild it on the inside to make it look exactly the same.”
“Even down to the background actors. Actors that were way in the distance. We had to track them, put them in the same clothes, hope they hadn’t changed. So there was a lot of luck in this movie. We just got lucky that people didn’t decide to lop off all their hair or gain a hundred pounds or whatever.”
But while Broussard is obviously sick of the attire, he actually didn’t mind having to play Carter on that day over and over again.
“It was a little difficult at first. But Carter is such an optimistic guy. He’s a little nerdy. But he’s sweet and he sees the best in people and he sees the best in every situation. As far as the continuity goes, I feel like I had a lot of freedom. The only thing that I have to be pretty conscious about is the line, ‘Oh hey, you’re up.’ That’s the line that’s kind of got to stay the same. But once she wakes up, it was fun playing off of whatever she gave me.”
It also didn’t help matters that there are only 16 months between the release dates for the films. Broussard, who only got got the script in December, admits, “We weren’t expecting the turnaround to be this quick actually. I wasn’t expecting the movie to be made this quick. I think we started filming at the end of May last year. So it had been a little over a year since we had filmed the first one.”
“When I read this script for the first time I thought we’d film it next year and then it’ll come out in a year or two. Then I learned that they were aiming for a Valentine’s Day release towards the end of shooting. That was just a rumor going around on set. It wasn’t official. So when they were like, ‘Yeah we’re doing it on Valentine’s day.’ I was like, ’It’s done!? We just got off set.’ So there was a lot of excitement with Blumhouse and Universal and I’m glad the turnaround happened. It is awesome.”
Happy Death Day 2U is released on February 13, 2019.
