Although the Warrens mainly bookend the new film — which is centered about their daughter Judy (Mckenna Grace) and two friends as they battle the hideously evil title doll — Farmiga tells us in the video interview below that it’s fun to slip back into Lorraine’s skin: “The danger is to get too comfortable in these roles,” says the actress. “But Lorraine — even the little time we spend with Lorraine, her presence is so formidable and so specific, that just always stays with me.”
Read More: The Conjuring Timeline Explained
Wilson, who unlike Farmiga never got to meet the real-life person he is playing, adds, “Each time we play these characters…I can’t say I watch full movies, but I’ll go back and watch the first Conjuring, Conjuring 2, the same YouTube videos of (Ed) — I do have to keep doing that, because the one thing we don’t do, as much fun as we have, we don’t rest on the performances. You want to push yourself as an actor, but you also want to push the character.”
“We explored the back story of Annabelle in Annabelle: Creation,” says Gary Dauberman, who has written all the Annabelle movies in addition to making his debut as a director on this one. “I thought the best way to approach this movie was something I really wanted to explore, the character of Judy Warren — who we’ve seen in other movies, but haven’t yet learned what it would be like to be the daughter of Ed and Lorraine Warren, which is something I thought a lot about and talked with the actual Judy about.”
“I think what we like about her is that we get to explore different types of scares, different kinds of horror within the story of Annabelle, and really the Warrens at large and all their case files,” Dauberman says. “So it never feels like we’re running into a dead end because there’s a new place to go or a new case to uncover.”
Don Kaye is a Los Angeles-based entertainment journalist and associate editor of Den of Geek. Other current and past outlets include Syfy, United Stations Radio Networks, Fandango, MSN, RollingStone.com and many more. Read more of his work here. Follow him on Twitter @donkaye
