Frozen Empire’s Surprise Star on Changing the Series’ Ghost Rules

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire has a lot of characters it’s juggling, and one of the most important wasn’t even actually in the film’s marketing. That would be Melody, played by Gossip Girl’s Emily Alyn Lind, a 16-year-old who quickly strikes up a friendship with McKenna Grace’s Phoebe Spengler. The twist? She’s a ghost forced to stay on Earth until she finds a way to reunite with her family on the other side.

In a recent Hollywood Reporter interview, Lind revealed that her ghost status was something even she didn’t know about until she’d locked down the role. Director Gil Kenan never explicitly said as such during their talks, and lines like “I get it. I’m like a hundred years old,” she just assumed that translated to Melody being an old soul. As for why it was kept secret, she reasoned it came from her character being “a different kind of ghost” for the series. Instead of being purely chaotic or malevolent, Melody’s “a ghost with a heart,” similar to Ghost Egon in Ghostbusters: Afterlife. “[She] has a full human relationship, so I think that there was a part of them that really wanted to catch people off guard in that sense.”

In the film, Melody’s stuck in limbo after her family died in a house fire she personally feels responsible for. Her choices in the film all stem from that survivor’s guilt, and Lind was frannk in saying she’s glad her character saw the error of her ways: for one thing, getting to team with the OG and new Ghostbusters at the end had her “so giddy,” and she loved sharing the screen with series veterans like Ernie Hudson and Annie Potts. But it also meant folks wouldn’t leave the theater calling for her head, “just like they’ve hated me in other films for fucking the story up.”

As for Melody and Phoebe’s friendship and all the subtext in the movie, Lind called their dynamic one of “two souls connecting.” While she acknowledged parts of it can be read as romantic—and that Phoebe wanted a closeness with someone—both characters are “still two kids in a lot of ways. They’re cut from the same cloth and ousiders in their own ways. […] And now they’re connecting on this grandiose level in two different dimensional planes, and they’re just trying to figure out this world together. I like that we didn’t define it as one thing or another. Sometimes, when people do that, it ruins it. It’s too concrete and absolute, and they’re so not absolute as characters.”

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is now playing in theaters.

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