Madelaine Petsch on Pain and Survival in ‘The Strangers – Chapter 2’ [Dread Central Digital Feature]
It seems like Madelaine Petsch is everywhere these days. But right now, she’s in my apartment—sort of. It’s around noon, and I’m Zooming with her from the comfort of my living room. I suddenly become acutely aware of what’s looming behind me in full view: my boyfriend’s Cleon Peterson painting, where figures are locked in a violent battle—one with a dagger raised, the other already driving a sword into its opponent’s abdomen. It’s a fitting backdrop, considering Petsch has been busy promoting The Strangers — Chapter 2, a film that, at its core, is about survival and the things gentle people are capable of when pushed to their limits.
This Dread Central Digital Feature spotlights Petsch at a pivotal moment in her career. During our interview, she appears poised and self-assured in a crisp white blouse with her red hair pulled back into a ponytail, a striking contrast to Maya, the soft-spoken stoner girlfriend who unraveled into an anxious, terrified mess in The Strangers — Chapter 1. The sequel, the second film in a reboot trilogy inspired by the 2008 home-invasion horror classic, picks up exactly where the previous film left off.
At the start of the film, Petsch’s character, Maya, jolts awake in a quiet hospital, having barely survived the previous night of violent terror. But Scarecrow, Dollface, and Pin-Up Girl aren’t finished with her yet, and this time it seems everyone has something to hide. With nowhere left to run, Maya realizes she has no choice but to kill or be killed if she wants to make it to Chapter 3. She throws herself from cars, bolts through the woods, and, in one particularly grueling scene, stitches up her own wounds.
It’s not an easy role, and it doesn’t make it any easier that Petsch shot the trilogy all at once with some scenes overlapping in a little less than two months. Did I mention she was shooting in Slovakia? In a behind-the-scenes Instagram carousel, she shared a screenshot of the forecast: 36 degrees, “feels like” 25, with a freezing rain warning and the promise that the following day would be even colder.
But Petsch, a former dancer, was built to handle intense shoots like these. “That is what built an innate tenacity in me,” she says, recalling her years of studying Russian ballet and performing in a dance troupe. “It’s part of what shaped me as the artist I am today—not being scared to take risks and to take on really physical roles like this.
It’s that dancer’s discipline that gave her the endurance and stamina necessary for The Strangers’ marathon shoots, where she stayed in Maya’s fight-or-flight headspace day in and day out. While it left her with little time to reset—Petsch admits it was a “detriment” to her mental health—ultimately, “for the film, it worked.”
I told her I had just visited Colorado, and The Strangers — Chapter 2 left me even more breathless than some of my admittedly modest hikes. (I’m from New York City—we don’t “do” mountains the same way we don’t drive, which is to say, rarely.)
She laughed, then explained that fear—arguably one of the hardest emotions to authentically convey and sustain onscreen—wasn’t something she had to force. “I would listen to hertz music—just kind of like a dull sound that empties your mind,” she says. “Other days I’d listen to screamo and metal, depending on how rageful [Maya] was going onto set.” She likens her approach to the famous water experiment, where molecules shift in response to sound. But music or no music, at the end of the day, “The circumstances are scary… so it all feels real. It has to.”
Petsch’s commitment pays off. Maya isn’t some helpless victim who happened to survive the night, nor is she the archetypal “final girl” we’ve been conditioned to expect. She also resists what I call Laurie Strode-ification—the traumatized survivor (usually a woman) who becomes hardened, hell-bent on revenge, and defined entirely by her pain.
Maya takes no sh*t (she isn’t afraid to grab a hunting knife, a gun, or a pair of scissors), but she’s also vulnerable. Her weapons don’t always guarantee success. There’s barely time to mourn her fiancé, Ryan. She can’t even process the horrors of the night before. Her sole focus is survival: getting from point A to point B with as much of herself intact as possible. That single-minded drive, at times, makes her feel almost animalistic—something I found refreshing during my watch.
But Petsch insists everything isn’t what it seems. “So much of the conversation around these films has been, ‘the final girl, the final girl, the final girl.’ You haven’t met the final girl yet. You meet her in movie three. That’s what really excites me.”
Still, she can’t resist a moment of levity. After watching Maya go through what is arguably the worst 48 hours anyone could experience, I asked what self-care advice she’d give her going into The Strangers — Chapter 3. Petsch wastes no time. “Honestly, she needs to clean up her wounds, drink a Celsius, take a shower, and she’ll be fine for the next movie.”
The Strangers: Chapter 2 is in theaters now.
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