Froy Gutierrez really wanted The Strangers fans to invest in his character Ryan’s romance with Madelaine Petsch‘s Maya.
“I think to me that was priority No. 1 above everything,” Gutierrez, 26, exclusively told Us Weekly about the movie, which hits theaters on Friday, May 17. “It was, ‘How can I convey that this is a real relationship?’ That these two people know each other, have known each other for five years and are deeply in love. They have a language that they only speak with each other and they share a lot of humor.”
Gutierrez recalled instantly clicking with Petsch, 29, while filming the trilogy.
“I remember I hadn’t actually met Mads before this movie and we met on the day — two weeks into shooting in Slovakia. And we both hit the ground running,” he noted. “We just really trusted each other to a great degree to both be present and be able to sell that genuine care and that love.”
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It was important for Gutierrez to frame Ryan and Maya’s relationship as an internal part of the story. “That’s what I kept coming back to because in a horror film like this, it’s kind of the obvious thing to play the horror,” he continued. “So I kept thinking, ‘OK, what can I play against? How can I play against that?’”
Ryan’s love for Maya is what ultimately drove the character.
“It was always about, ‘What am I fighting for? What is the survival for?’ And for me, it was to keep Maya safe,” Gutierrez explained. “That was my objective. My objective is to make sure we both get out of here.”
The Strangers is based on the original 2008 home invasion horror film starring Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman. In this version, Petsch and Gutierrez play a couple on the road who end up trapped in a small town. They stay in a cabin for the night, which is when Ryan and Maya are forced to face off against masked killers.
“Ryan is not in a horror movie. He’s in an action movie. He thinks he’s in the Titanic or something. He thinks he’s going to get [Maya] out of here and everything’s going to be fine,” Gutierrez shared with Us. “And those obstacles that keep showing up in the more bizarre and dark ways — that’s where the terror really seeps in [for him].”
Before the new iteration came out in theaters, Gutierrez opened up about his thoughts on the original franchise.
“I was very intimidated to be working with somebody as legendary as [director] Renny Harlin and with an IP as classic and that has such a cult following as The Strangers. So I actually hadn’t seen the 2008 version,” he revealed. “When I booked the job, that immediately was the first thing I did.”
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Gutierrez continued: “I remember sitting down and being like, ‘OK, I can’t do the same thing as [Liv and Scott] because it’s already been done perfectly. So I have to go do something entirely different — even though the silhouette is very much the same. The way that we filled it in is very, very different in this movie.”
Petsch also previously told Us about the research she did for the project.
“I’m a very big horror fan and The Strangers is probably the first movie I ever saw that really scared me. When I got the script in my inbox, I went back and rewatched it. [I wanted to] find out what really was so scary about those films and they’re really not jump scare [movies],” she told Us in July 2023. “It’s really not about that. It’s just so, like, bone-chilling would be the word that I used because it’s kind of like the original home invasion films. Yeah. Where there is no rhyme or reason to it. So we were able to take that and elevate it.”
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At the time, Petsch discussed filming all three movies back to back.
“When I took this task on, it felt far too large for anybody to ever handle. Like truly, I thought, ‘I’m over my head.’ But then when I got there — all three films took place in a short amount of time. So [once I approached it like] I was doing one long movie, it all made sense to me,” the actress detailed. “I was able to fit this puzzle together as if I was basically making one long movie or a television show or anything else. It was actually quite easy to get my brain around it once I realized the span of time it takes place over.”
The Strangers: Chapter 1 is out in theaters nationwide Friday, May 17.
