SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains major spoilers for Ready Or Not 2: Here I Come (which is now playing in theaters everywhere). If you have not yet seen the film, proceed at your own risk!
There are a number of shocking turns of events in the 108 minute runtime of Ready Or Not 2: Here I Come, but easily ranking toward the top is the death of Sarah Michelle Gellar's Ursula Danforth. The actress has a precedent of dying in horror movies (see: Scream 2 and I Know What You Did Last Summer), but it's nonetheless a surprise to see her character exit the film prior to the climax. It's a moment in the film that has inspired gasps from audiences… but for Gellar herself, it was met with a reaction of relief.
It's not the response you'd expect from an actor (one imagines the revelation being met with sadness because it brings their time with a production to a premature end), but Gellar was totally honest about it when I asked her about Ursula's death during the Ready Or Not 2: Here I Come Los Angeles press day late last month. Sitting beside co-star Elijah Wood, she expressed some guilt about her feelings, but had a good reason to back them up:
I had the worst response. I was like, 'Oh thank god I don't have to be in that huge scene at the end that's gonna take forever.' . That was literally my response, because I kept reading like, 'Oh, she's still alive. She's still alive. Uhoh uhoh, uhoh.' Because you never wanna be in the big [finale] 'cause that big end scene's always the hardest scene to film.
When one looks back on the ending of the new horror movie, one understands what she means. Scaled way up from the grand finale of 2019's Ready Or Not (set in an expansive living room with a dozen or so actors and some blood cannon explosions), the sequel features a cavernous ceremonial set with a giant pit, a crowd of hooded figures, and gallons upon gallons of fake blood.
Elijah Wood, who plays the mysterious figure known only as The Lawyer, confirmed that filming the end of Ready Or Not 2 took a long time, and it led to a fun exchange between the two genre icons:
- Elijah Wood: It was days. It was days. I was there. I remember.
- Sarah Michelle Gellar: I know. I was back in LA.
- Elijah Wood: It was pretty fun though!
Sarah Michelle Gellar is absent from the climax of Ready Or Not 2 because Ursula's neck is snapped by her brother, Shawn Hatosy's Titus Danforth – but does she at least regret not going out in a big explosion of blood? Said Gellar,
Not even a bit. I've been there. I've been covered in that. Nope. I'm good.
Instead, she leaves all of the messiness to all of her co-stars – and for what it's worth, even while they are acting scared and grossed out, you can still get the sense that there was a lot of fun had on set.
