Scream VI Star Jasmin Savoy Brown Originally Never Had An Interest In Horror
This post contains spoilers for "Scream VI," "Scream 2," and "Yellowjackets."
Though she's been on the radar of HBO viewers since her recurring role on "The Leftovers" in the mid-2010s, Jasmin Savoy Brown has developed something of a scream queen reputation in the 2020s. That's not just because she's one of the newly christened "Core Four" in the "Scream" requel series, either. Brown starred in another slasher film, "Sound of Violence," in 2021, and since last year, she's been among the core of a different four on Showtime's "Yellowjackets," where her cannibalistic character grows up to be a politician who sacrifices the family dog on an altar in her basement.
If that's not horror, it's at least horror-adjacent. For Brown, it's all in a day's acting work — but believe it or not, she didn't always have designs on the horror genre, despite her résumé leading up to this year's "Scream VI." In an interview with Elle (via IndieWire) in April, the 29-year-old actress, who is Black and biracial and further identifies as queer and lesbian, said, "I was never interested in horror because it was just so straight and white. That's just not interesting to me, aside from my one white woman show a year, which was [HBO's] 'Big Little Lies' and then 'The White Lotus.'"
In both last year's "Scream" and the New York-set franchise "reinvention," "Scream VI," Brown's character, Mindy Meeks-Martin, serves as the modern-day equivalent of her uncle, Randy Meeks (Jamie Kennedy), who famously outlined "the rules" in the original 1990s "Scream" trilogy. It's Mindy who explains the concept of a requel (or legacy sequel) in "Scream," and it's Mindy who gives updated rules for surviving a horror franchise in "Scream VI."
The new Core Four
Ghostface leaves Mindy for dead on the train in "Scream VI," but fortunately, she survives his attack. Not everyone in the "Scream" franchise is so lucky. Uncle Randy's previous slasher survival tips, such as "Never, ever, ever, under any circumstances, say, 'I'll be right back,'" only got him so far, as the Ghostface killer soon caught up with him in broad daylight on a college campus in "Scream 2" (a scene "Scream VI" references).
"Scream 2" is the same movie that began with two Black characters, played by Omar Epps and Jada Pinkett Smith, discussing how "the horror genre is historical... for excluding the African-American element," shortly before they, too, met the business end of Ghostface's knife. That scene was penned by Kevin Williamson, a gay white screenwriter, who offed Jada's character the way Chris Rock character-assassinated her in real life, while sparing the other four white characters in the "Scream 2" movie poster.
Those four characters — one of whom, Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox), returns in "Scream VI" — long enjoyed the same plot armor that Mindy and the non-white-male Core Four now do. In her Elle interview, though, Jasmin Savoy Brown praised how "Mindy's queerness has nothing to do with her character arc, and no one cares." (Elsewhere, Mindy has warned the characters of "Scream" about toxic "Stab" fans and Dreaditors complaining about "how they crammed in social commentary" just to make the horror elevated.)
As for Brown, she's copacetic with whatever becomes of Mindy after this. She concluded by saying: "All three options in a 'Scream' movie are solid. You either die, and it's going to be an epic death. You survive, and that's amazing, or you're the killer. So, no matter which hand I'm dealt, every time I'm happy."
"Scream VI" is now streaming on Paramount+.