Melissa Barrera said in an interview with The Independent that “there were times where I felt like my life was over” after she was fired from the “Scream” franchise one year ago due to social media posts about Palestine that Spyglass, the studio behind the horror franchise, deemed antisemitic.
“It was quiet for, like, 10 months,” Barrera said while discussing how acting work more or less disappeared for her after she was fired. “I was still getting offers for small things here and there – I’m not going to lie and say there was nothing – but [the message] was, like, ‘Oh, she probably doesn’t have work, she’ll say yes to anything’.”
Barrera played Sam Carpenter, the daughter of Billy Loomis, in 2022’s “Scream” and 2023’s “Scream 6,” the latter of which set a franchise box office record with $108 million at the domestic box office. She was all set to continue playing Sam in “Scream 7” until her abrupt firing, but she refuses to let that decision taint her memories of “Scream.”
“They gave me a lot in my career,” Barrera said. “I made really good friends. I have such loyal fans from those movies that are now watching the rest of the stuff that I do.”
Per The Independent: “But she admits that there are drawbacks. At fan conventions, for instance, parades of ‘Scream’ devotees are prone to sympathetically allude to the controversy between autograph signings, or asking how she’s doing.”
“Or they’re like, ‘What they did to you is so messed up, I’m so sorry that happened!’” Barrera added. “And it’s something, I think, that’s never going to end. Because the franchise is never going to end. So while I still have so much love for [those movies], the reminders of that very sour moment make it a little bit weird.”
While offers stopped coming in for the most part after the “Scream” firing, Barrera is now finally getting back to work. She’s currently filming a new espionage thriller series for Peacock alongside Simu Liu that she calls “exactly what I needed to ease myself back into the industry and do something fun that’s not going to destroy me emotionally.”
“It felt like I had been invisible, and then all of a sudden, there was a switch that made me visible again,” she added. “I feel better. I was stuck in the sand dunes for a while, and now I feel like my feet are moving, I have an oxygen tank, and I’m, like… going up.”
Head over to The Independent’s website to read Barrera’s latest profile in its entirety.
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