Summary
From the mind behind Happy Death Day and Freaky comes another genre-bending slasher in It’s a Wonderful Knife. Inspired by the similarly titled Christmas classic, the movie centers on a young woman who saves her town from a killer, only to become alienated after a year. After wishing she was never born, the heroine finds herself in an alternate universe in which the killer’s reign of terror has continued and must find a way to stop them and get back home before it’s too late.
Jane Widdop leads the ensemble It’s a Wonderful Knife cast alongside Joel McHale, Jess McLeod, Justin Long, Katherine Isabelle, Aiden Howard, Hana Huggins, Cassandra Naud, Erin Boye and William D. Davies. Penned by genre vet Michael Kennedy and helmed by V/H/S 99 alum and Five Nights at Freddy’s co-writer Tyler MacIntyre, the movie is another hilarious and thrilling horror twist.
In anticipation of the movie’s release on Shudder, Screen Rant interviewed star Jane Widdop to discuss It’s a Wonderful Knife, how they dissected its genre-bending concept, their love of the final girl archetype, and bonding with their co-stars.
Jane Widdop Talks It’s a Wonderful Knife
Screen Rant: Jane, it’s great to get to meet you and talk with you for It’s a Wonderful Knife. It is such a fun movie, and as a horror genre fan, as a Michael Kennedy fan, it just fits so nicely into that mold. What about the project really sparked your initial interest want to be a part of it?
Jane Widdop: You know, I loved Winnie as a character. I love the whole final girl aspect, I have been a really big fan of that in the horror genre. I’m a really big fan of the film X, which has an insane final girl. So, I think that really drew me in, but also just the warmth of it. It is a scary film, but there is this heartwarming, gooey center to the film that I just fell in love with. And, like you said, I’m also a huge Michael Kennedy fan, so that was the other thing. I was like, “I’ve seen Freaky, I know where this is gonna go, and I want to be on board.”
He always takes such great familiar concepts and turns them into something wild! Now, you talk about loving Winnie. What would you say about her in the script really helped you connect to her and bring her to life on screen?
Jane Widdop: Yeah, so at the beginning, when we first see Winnie and she’s in the town, we actually cut out a beginning scene that was in that where I take a bite out of a bun, and then I take a picture kind of a la George Bailey with the suitcase that he gets, but we ended up cutting that out. But in the script, it says, “We first see Winnie, and she has what seems to be an air of loneliness,” and I loved that description. Because she is kind of the girl that’s in the popular group of kids, but does feel like an outsider, and I just loved that. I loved that piece of how Michael was able to tie that in, and I love his descriptions in the scripts, they’re amazing.
That’s wonderful. Part of me wants to see that scene, but another part of me feels like it is sort of better without it. Maybe a bonus feature?
Jane Widdop: Yeah, who knows? Who knows, maybe it’ll end up in like an extended cut somewhere down the line. [Chuckles]
There you go, that’d be fun to see! Now, this movie also requires a lot of physicality, as you’re in a lot of those scenes with the killer. What was it like having to be extra physical and choreograph those fight scenes?
Jane Widdop: Yeah, we did three rehearsals prior to filming, and we had an amazing stunt team, Yusuf was our stunt coordinator, and he’s amazing. And then Cody Laudan played our Angel, and he was just super nice and really informative, helped guide me through each step and told me, like, “This is what you have to do, this is what you have to do. Also, I don’t care if you hurt me, because you’re fine.” And I was like, “No,” I was so scared I was gonna hurt him.
But we were able to do it and make it seem so believable, because I think part of what we were struggling with was, “Can we do this certain thing and keep everybody safe and have it look right?” That’s kind of the whole thing with stunts, and I think we were able to do a really great job of that, camera and stunts came together in such a beautiful way, which I loved. The physicality honestly wasn’t too bad. I think it’s just because we were filming so quick, we only had, like, three or four takes to get each of these done scenes. So, you know, there wasn’t much physicality besides just like pulling up and doing it and then being finished with it. But, I will say, the training before was probably the most physical, even though it wasn’t even that much training.
Was there any scene in particular you recall being the most challenging in that sense?
Jane Widdop: Yeah, the one where Bernie and I are running out of her house, and I opened the door and the Angel is right there. That was just a whole mess to try and film and navigate, because I couldn’t physically kick the door. They had to have somebody on the ground swing the door and slam it shut, because it was a liability if I kicked the door. I was like, “Fair enough, okay.” So, it was just timing and all that, but it looks great. I wouldn’t be able to believe that it wasn’t me kicking the door now.
I definitely didn’t catch it, they pulled it off.
Jane Widdop: You don’t see the P.A. down at the bottom. [Laughs]
Now, speaking of Bernie, actually, I love the dynamic that you and Jess McLeod have throughout the movie. What was it like developing that relationship with Jess, both prior to and during filming?
Jane Widdop: So we met, I want to say, three days before we started filming, and the first time we met was in a little director’s workshop session. Immediately, there was just so much chemistry between the two of our characters together in a scene, which was just crazy to see. Because, Jess and I have become friends through filming. We have, like, zero chemistry as two actors and two people, but when our characters are on-screen, there’s so much chemistry. It’s just like these weird film things that happen, but it was really, really cool.
Actually, the ending piece — surprise! — was not planned. Jess and I were on set, and I think it was the second day on set, we both had this idea, like, “If we don’t do this, we would be queerbaiting, so we kind of need to make this happen. And these characters have so much chemistry, we can’t not give them the justice that they deserve.” So that was really cool to be able to work with Michael and Tyler, and they were on board from the get go, so it was really cool, and it was a really, really collaborative process between all of us.
I was definitely waiting for that moment to happen, and was like, “When? Come on!”
Jane Widdop: If we didn’t put it in, it would have been bad. We had to put it in! [Laughs]
Yeah, you had to get to that gooey center, like you were talking about earlier. Now, you talked earlier about your love of the final girl, and you work opposite two horror genre vets in this. You have Justin Long and you have Katherine Isabelle. What was it like working with those established genre actors and learning from them as much as putting your own stamp on the genre?
Jane Widdop: Oh, my gosh, it was so cool. Katherine is — I just was awed to watch her work every day. She would just laugh, and was having a good time before [rolling], and then as soon as she’s in character, it’s like she is a completely different person. She almost looks like a different person on screen when you look behind the camera, so it’s really cool to see that. And she always brings such cool elements to the scene that I wouldn’t think of. Like, for example, when she’s stepping over the body, and she does the little thing with her toes, I love that. Just the little things that she does were amazing. And then with Justin, that man can ad lib and go off on [crazy tangents]. I don’t know how his brain works like that, he just will go on and on and on, and it’s so good every single time, you’re just laughing and cracking up. And he just hits the mark every single time, and it was really, really cool to watch how he was able to do that. And with Joel, Joel is really good at ad-libbing, and the comedy aspect. Both of them are comedy legends, and it was just really, really cool to see both of them work and find those comedic moments, which I’m still learning to do. So it’s really, really cool to be able to see them and watch them work.
I’ve loved Justin’s work for years, since Dodgeball when I first watched it as a kid, so I hear you! I actually wanted to expand on Joel, because you have such a unique relationship with him in that you go from loving him one moment to having to hate him as you go to an alternate universe. What is that like for you as an actor navigating those two very different dynamics through filming?
Jane Widdop: Yeah, I definitely had to keep pre-Winnie and post-Winnie in my head. Part of what I did to prep for this is I went through the script probably three times in its entirety, start to finish, because there was no other way for my brain to be able to understand everything that happens. I also wrote out a huge timeline that kind of makes me look like a crazy person, because there’s every little nitty-gritty detail, and I did this before I even booked it. I was just very into it. [Laughs] But I think those kinds of things really help in terms of being able to switch in and out, because I mean, the first scene that we filmed is the one where I’m walking onto the lookout at my parents’ house and I say, “Not another Christmas.”
And then the second scene we filmed was me running in after, giving my parents a hug at the very end of the movie, so just you’re going up and down all day, up and down and up and down. So, it really did help me doing that, going through them in its entirety, so that I could just go back and immediately go to my notes. I also did do some recording sessions like a crazy person with Voice Memos on my phone, and I would go back and listen to each section before the start of each day and go to each scene, and then I would listen before to what was going on before in the script, and what was going on right after. It was a process, but it was really, really cool. I’ve never done anything like it in my acting career, so I loved being able to sink my teeth into it and really get some heavy research.
We talked about Michael’s own past in this genre, but I’m curious if he or Tyler gave you any homework, so to speak, of movies to watch to help you get in the mood for this film?
Jane Widdop: Yeah, so I wouldn’t say it was homework, like, “You have to watch these.” But Tyler did put together an incredible lookbook before we started shooting, and it had a bunch of different movies that he had referenced. Off the top of my head, [there was] Scream, It’s a Wonderful Life, X was on there, Scrooged was on there. Oh, Ready or Not, that was a big one. Those are the ones that I can think of for now, but he had a huge collage of just each movie, and the movies where the pictures were bigger were the ones that influenced it more. It was really cool, the way Tyler’s brain works is so cool.
I love that. Scrooged is an underrated pull for Christmas movies.
Jane Widdop: I would agree, I think it’s one of his favorite Christmas movies, if not his favorite Christmas movie, but I could be wrong.
It’s a great choice to get a little subversive in the holiday season. Now, I’m curious to hear about location shooting on this one, because obviously sometimes winter-set films can be shot in the summer, or vice versa. I’m curious if you were actually in snowy locations and how that affected you during filming?
Jane Widdop: We were in a cold location. So we were in Vancouver from mid-March to mid-April, so it wasn’t actively snowing. There was no snow on the ground, it was still a little chilly. You can see our breath at night, which Tyler really wanted, he did not want to CGI in breath. But it’s funny, because you see a lot of snow around, they actually would go every single day, like maybe at night or in the early parts of the morning, to all the hockey ice skating rinks around — which are plentiful in Vancouver — and take all of the shavings from the ice rink that they would plow every single day. And they would pile it all into a little truck that would come around, and it was the snow truck, and it was free snow, because they didn’t need it anymore. So, you know, ballin’ on a budget. [Chuckles]
That’s pretty incredible. So then, with it being somewhat chilly, what was it like running down the street, yelling, “It’s Christmas,” that day, and in that Christmas outfit that you had?
Jane Widdop: You know, that was probably my sixth run down the block, I was pretty warmed up at that point. They kept me in so many layers, too, if I needed it, and I had like hot shots in my pocket, and warmers and my boots. I was set, it was all good. It’s nothing I’m unfamiliar with after Yellowjackets, because we had some cold days on that set. [Laughs]
Widdop starred in Yellowjackets season 1 as Laura Lee, the devout Christian member of the soccer team who met an explosive fate while trying to fly an abandoned plane out of the snowy wilderness.
About It’s a Wonderful Knife
In It’s a Wonderful Knife, a year after saving her town from a psychotic killer on Christmas Eve, Winnie Carruthers’ life is less than wonderful — but when she wishes she’d never been born, she finds herself in a nightmare parallel universe and discovers that without her, things could be much, much worse. Now the killer is back, and she must team up with the town misfit to identify the killer and get back to her own reality. It’s a Wonderful Life by way of Scream.
It’s a Wonderful Knife begins streaming on Shudder and is available to rent on digital platforms on December 1.
Source: Screen Rant Plus
