I have a tough exterior,” the Scream actor Melissa Barrera tells me. “You’d never know when I’m panicking.” Does she think of it as a superpower, I ask. “It’s more like a fatal flaw,” she sighs. “Like, am I a sociopath? Because I should be dying right now. Especially after this last year for me, how am I even alive?”
To her credit, Barrera brings up the elephant in the room before I do. There was a point in time when this sort of caveat wasn’t necessary: all Barrera used to be known for was her acting. The 34-year-old was a star in her native Mexico, and over the past four years had worked her way up to leading lady status in the US. She had a big-budget musical under her belt (the film adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights), a Paul Mescal romantic drama (the experimental dance movie Carmen), and her own franchise: in the rebooted Scream films, where she played the traumatised daughter of a serial killer, heir apparent to the series’ original lead Neve Campbell.
