Jack Quaid on joining the Scream team and why The Boys’ new season is ‘the craziest s--t’ ever

Scream’s Ghostface left The Boys star Jack Quaid terrified as a child, yet he couldn’t wait to join the beloved horror franchise.

Starring in the latest chapter of revered horror franchise Scream brought back some slightly traumatic memories for Jack Quaid.

The American actor – the son of veteran stars Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan – remembers all too well when Wes Craven’s original Scream came out in 1996 and the effect it had on Halloween dress-ups for years after.

In fact, he was so petrified by the infamous Ghostface killer that it put him off the horror genre entirely for more than a decade.

“It was maybe the first time I ever went trick or treating,” Quaid recalls over Zoom call from his Los Angeles home. “I saw a bunch of kids wearing Ghostface masks because the original Scream had just come out and they terrified me.

“I remember being so afraid of Ghostface and it kind of set me on this path of not really going to see horror movies because I just assumed that they would be way scarier.

“Your imagination makes them so much worse than the movie actually is but I didn’t know that at the time.”

It wasn’t until his late teens that Quaid finally overcame his fears and embraced not just the Scream franchise – which comprises four movies to date, the most recent being 2011’s Scream 4 – but horror movies more broadly.

Jack Quaid (Richie) and Melissa Barrera (Sam) star in a scene from Scream.

“I think that there’s something to experiencing something that makes our heart race a little bit and in a safe way,” he muses about why audiences continue to pay good money to have the pants scared off them.

“It’s sitting there in the dark and watching horrible things happen to people from a safe distance. It’s great for a thrill – everyone has been on a roller coaster and everyone understands that just a little bit of danger is exciting.

“It’s like a window into a darker reality that you can appreciate from a sizeable distance away.”

In the 1970s and 1980s Craven had already earned the title Master of Horror thanks to fright-fests including The Hills Have Eyes, The Last House On the Left and A Nightmare On Elm Street, so was well placed to turn the genre on its head with the original Scream.

Starring Party of Five’s Neve Campbell and Courteney Cox at the height of her Friends fame, the blackly funny, self-aware and genuinely scary slasher flick knowingly tipped its hat at the tired horror tropes established through endless Halloween, Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street sequels and subverted them to its own fiendish ends.

In doing so, it attracted a whole new generation of horror fans, raking in $240 million from its modest $20 million budget.

Courteney Cox (left), Jamie Kennedy and Neve Campbell in the original Scream.

“I think it was a lot of people’s gateway drug to the horror genre,” says Quaid.

“It came out in a time where horror movies were kind of trite. (Friday the 13th’s) Jason was going to space and there had been like, four Leprechaun movies and four or five of every franchise and things were getting a little bit stale.

“Then Scream came along and the characters in it were the audience. The characters in it also watched horror movies – they were you. They understood all the tropes of it and putting that kind of self-reflective lens on a horror movie was really powerful and revitalised the genre and made it interesting again.”

The new movie, once again just titled Scream, is the first in the franchise since Craven died in 2014. Campbell and Cox are reprising their roles as the resourceful and resilient Sidney Prescott and dogged journalist Gale Weathers respectively, as is Cox’s former husband David Arquette as small-town Woodsboro cop Dewey Riley.

Newcomer Quaid, who is cagey about letting anything slip about the closely guarded plot, plays Richie Kirsch, a “bit of an audience surrogate, particularly for people who aren’t necessarily well versed in horror movies or Scream itself”.

“He’s new to Woodsboro, he’s new to the idea of serial killers lurking around every corner and he gets a crash course in this movie,” he says.

Filling the large shoes of Craven are Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett and Chad Villella, who work under the collective name of Radio Silence. Quaid says the producing-directing team was well aware of the Scream legacy and their love of Craven and horror shows “in every frame”.

The fact that the original cast members agreed to come back also served as a kind of blessing and passing of the baton.

“They really wanted to make this a movie that Wes Craven would be proud of so I think if you’re a really big fan of the first movie, you’re really going to love this one,” he says. “And for fans of the franchise, this is really just trying to be a love letter to you.”

Like all his castmates, Quaid was grateful for the chance to get back to work when Scream became one of the early productions to get up and running after the Covid-related shutdowns of 2020 and was happy to endure all the safety protocols in the pre-vaccine era.

“The fact that we got to be in a relatively safe environment where people were being tested and I could have a group of people that I knew were safe to be around, hang out with me, it was a lot like summer camp.

“I will be forever grateful to this movie for giving me that opportunity and that kind of breath of normalcy in a very chaotic time. I couldn’t be more thankful to Scream for giving me that.”

Jack Quaid says the coming season of The Boys is the best yet.

Quaid admits he’s had an easier time than many of his fellow actors in an extremely difficult period for the industry. Not only has he been able to film Scream, but he’s also been able to record the lead voice role in the animated Star Trek comedy Below Decks as well as making a third season of his hit superhero series The Boys, in which he plays Hughie Campbell.

The last season of the savage satire – about a band of ordinary men and women trying to take down an organisation of powerful but corrupt costumed heroes – was nominated for an Outstanding Drama Series Emmy but Quaid says that audiences ain’t seen nothing yet.

“I can say this – and I’m very biased – but I think it’s our best season yet,” he says of the new season, which will air on Amazon Prime Video on June 3. “I think that we do some shit in even the very first episode that I think is the craziest shit we’ve ever done in our lives. And I think I can say I had the most fun making this season.”

Ghostface, from the Scream franchise, horrified a young Jack Quaid.

The Boys – and particularly Anthony Starr’s portrayal of psychopathic superhero Homelander – has never been shy about drawing parallels with the previous occupant of the White House and the cult of personality that got him there. But while the new season is the first since the former president was given his marching orders at the ballot box, Quaid says the bigger issues are just as relevant as ever for the show and in real life.

“Trump might have gone away for a bit – but I think the whole cult of personality is just as real as ever,” he says. “There’s something about people – we love a big personality and some people are willing to follow that to the craziest degree. That doesn’t cease to be a heavy theme in The Boys season three, I can tell you that.”

Scream opens in cinemas on January 13.