Vera Farmiga doubles down on the scares with "The Conjuring 2"
Vera Farmiga wouldn't necessarily call herself a fearful person, but when prepping for the first "Conjuring" film in 2013, based on the true stories of Lorraine and Ed Warren, she couldn't bring herself to venture into the real-life basement room where paranormal investigator Lorraine keeps all the artifacts from her and late husband Ed's cases.
But for the sequel -- in which Farmiga reprises her role as Lorraine, with Patrick Wilson as Ed -- she knew she had to finally confront that room, she tells CBS News.
Since the first film received so much praise and was such a surprise success, does that add an extra level of pressure or trepidation when you're making a sequel?
You do have awareness that there's automatically a groan that comes along with it with the sequel status, but I'm ballsy that way. I don't know, I just want to have a good time and I want to delve deeper. I'm all for further character exploration, so I'm looking at it very selfishly. I don't really care what anyone thinks, you know? It's my time, I'm signing on to do a project so it needs to be meaningful to me.
And I adore working with Patrick Wilson, we're really good buds and it's really frothy fun when you mix the two of us together on set. At this point of my career, after 40-something films and 20 years, if I'm going to take this time away from my family, I just want to have fun. I want to be around good, kind, loving, warmhearted people.
As far as expectations go, you're at least dealing with a property that generally everyone is excited about.
I think so. And for me the story is about a husband and wife. I've always treated it as a love story. We touched on it in the first one, and so we can go deeper and deeper into that exploration and explore their astounding love and friendship and partnership. So when they're in peril and their partnership is in peril, then the scares will be there for you because you root for them.
I'm glad to hear that you and Patrick get along so well, because you have such good chemistry on screen.
He's a freaking goofball, he really is. That chemistry -- yeah, what can I say about it? What is chemistry? It's funny, I always ask that question and I don't think I've ever not had chemistry. I would never mention names, but I really can't think of a scenario where I haven't been able to find some kind of chemistry, regardless of what you have naturally as a rapport. With Patrick, it's a definitive friendship and it is attraction. I'm attracted to his goodness, I'm attracted to his goofiness, and he just lights me up, he really is this radiant spark. You know, he's baking soda and I'm vinegar. It gets pretty bubbly.
There's a particularly terrifying armchair in the film that turns out to be the kind of cursed object the Warrens deal with a lot. Why wouldn't the family just get rid of it?
I think [real-life] Lorraine would say, "Well, I agree." But in her basement, she lives with all these artifacts from all the cases. They don't destroy them. Somehow they just group them all together, and wouldn't you think that like the sum of all these parts is even more dangerous? I finally went in. I didn't go the first time I visited, but I was girded after a glass of wine and had courage to go down. And you know? It's just a dingy basement full of stuff.
In my mind's eye for the last four years I've been telling myself, "Yeah, I have to go down to this dungeon" and imagining this is clinical white room -- more like an art installation where the walls are just white and like every 10 feet you have something hanging or standing, but instead it's like just a cluttered mess of hundreds of thousands of objects that were attached to some sort of negative mysticism, and it just really seemed like my grandma's basement. But I did not touch anything. There was Annabelle, and I didn't pick her up and comb her hair or anything.
Yeah, that's not recommended.
No, but I could see her.
"The Conjuring 2" is in theaters starting June 10.