Earlier this year at WonderCon in Anaheim, the enchanted CBR Tiki Room became the haunted CBR Tiki Room as director Leigh Whannell and star Lin Shaye sat down with Jonah Weiland to discuss the latest terrifying film in their horror franchise, "Insidious: Chapter 3." They talked about why the third film goes back to the beginning rather than acting as a traditional sequel, how Whannell transitioned from writer to director and, according to Shaye, how he did his first time out. Shaye, a veteran actor known for playing less than glamorous roles, shares her personal take on her own looks versus those of her characters and shares a hilarious story about auditioning for her role in the Farrelly brothers film "Kingpin" and what she did to land the part.
On the decision to make the third film in the series a prequel:
Leigh Whannell: It really was driven by Lin, by Miss Shaye, because when I was thinking about what we could possibly do for a sequel I thought, well the Lambert family from the first two films, they've kind of had enough. They've been beaten up by ghosts so much that if we do it a third time it's gonna be a bit ridiculous. So I realized Lin was the best character to continue -- but unfortunately we killed her in the first one. Spoiler alert, we killed Lin. I always say, you know, I want the living version of Lin Shaye. As you can see, she's so animated and she's so quirky, I don't want somber, dead Lin Shaye floating around in a nightgown with a candelabra. I want Lin bouncing off the walls. So if you do that, you have to go backwards. As soon as I made that decision, I started getting really excited about the idea of a prequel.
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On wiping egg whites on her face when she auditioned for her role in "Kingpin":
Lin Shaye: I wasn't able to get an audition for quite a while and finally they said they would bring me in. I had worked for almost two weeks on finding the angriest, ugliest woman that ever lived on the planet, that was the way she's described. And so I thought, what kind of things could make her feel that way? She's probably got terrible skin and her hair is greasy and she smokes and her teeth are yellow and she's got a unibrow. And she's got a mustache, and she's got bad breath, and she's got psoriasis -- I tried to come up with everything I could come up with physically that would manifest itself into being so angry and sad about your life.
Lo and behold, there arose Mrs. Dumars in my own mirror in my bedroom. And part of the psoriasis, the bad skin, was my mom used to give herself an egg white mask -- which tightens your pores, for all the women out there who don't know that, it's true. [Laughs] I figured out if I put it on and then I rubbed it, it got real flakey. Then I figured out if I put a little yolk in there that would make me look kind of jaundiced, and it didn't occur to me to go get real makeup. So I really, for the audition--
Whannell: Well you got the part, so obviously... Didn't the Farrelly brothers think that you were some person off the street who had wandered into the casting office?
Shaye: They actually did. They walked by me three times when I was sitting in the hallway, and when I came in they really were kind of like "What?!" The good thing was they knew me a little bit before so they didn't think I was totally an idiot or a frightening person, that I was really an actress trying to do something. And it did, it worked.