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Variety returned to San Diego Comic-Con and hosted the casts of major movies and TV shows, like “Resident Evil,” “Ghosts,” “Walking Dead: Dead City” and more in the Variety Studio, presented by Google TV.
Resident Evil
Watching Austin Abrams turn an off-beat junkie into a complex character in “Weapons” was what made Zach Cregger see him as the perfect “everyman” Bryan for his “Resident Evil” movie. “It was just so clear that we were very aligned on how we saw the movie,” Cregger says. “I feel like anything he does, you’re gonna root for him.” He also confirmed that “Resident Evil” will tonally be similar to both “Weapons” and “Barbarian.”
Elsewhere in the conversation, Cregger provided an update on the highly anticipated Aunt Gladys prequel, confirming that Oscar-winner Amy Madigan will return despite the film being a prequel: “There’s a really interesting story that exists for Gladys because the way she goes from being a normal person to what she becomes in that movie — to me, [it’s] a really cool story, and I just didn’t get to tell it in ‘Weapons.’”
My Adventures With Superman
Jack Quaid, Alice Lee, Ishmei Sahid, Kiana Madeira and executive producers and showrunners Jake Wyatt and Brendan Clogher took a break from fighting crime to talk all things “My Adventures With Superman.”
Season 3 of the animated series premiered June 13, and the cast teased the final episodes will feature “weirder, badder guys.” By the time the third season comes to a close, Wyatt teased many of the characters will be in different places than how they began. “Everybody’s a different person than they were when they started the season. Lois goes fully around on what she thought could expect from the future and the way she was going to face it. Clark has a different relationship to his powers and to Superman and to the whole world, and Jimmy and Kara torture each other in totally different positions,” he said.
Wyatt also gave an update on the series’ spinoff “My Adventures With Green Lantern,” confirming everything has been recorded, and they are currently in animation with their South Korean partners, E Nation.
Ghosts
After Season 5 ended on a cliffhanger, “Ghosts” stars Utkarsh Ambudkar, Asher Grodman and Román Zaragoza joined Variety to discuss what fans can expect for the sixth season.
The new season will also feature Holiday episodes for Halloween and Christmas, the latter of which was based on Ambudkar’s favorite holiday movie, “Die Hard.” “The Christmas episodes always seem to bring these surprising new dynamics, so that time gives us a chance to go a little crazy,” Grodman said.
“It’s the magic of Christmas,” Zaragoza added.
Ambudkar also joked about sharing the limelight with upcoming vampire spinoff “Eternally Yours,” even teasing a potential crossover. “It just makes perfect sense for the vampires or their kids. I don’t know the show very well, but if we could work with those actors. I think we’d be stoked,” he said. “I wonder if vampires can see ghosts.”
Eternally Yours
Ed Weeks knew he blew his audition on a 2019 episode of “Dead Pilots Society,” where the vampire comedy “Eternally Yours” had its first table read years before getting picked up by CBS.
“I didn’t think I’d done very well, honestly. I kind of swallowed a couple of the gags and I kind of left without really saying goodbye to anybody,” Weeks said. “I just couldn’t even think about it. Then the pandemic happened, and ‘Ghosts’ was an enormous hit. And then seven years later, the audition came in my inbox.”
Cast member Parker Young, who was joined in the studio by Weeks, Allegra Edwards, Jaren Lewison, Helen J. Shen and Parker Young, teased the character struggles: “As vampires, we’re constantly torn between trying to be good people versus giving into our desires, to eat people!”
Edwards, who plays someone stuck in a loveless 500-year marriage, explained that: “We’re gonna get to see flashbacks, which is the best part of our show, in my opinion, is getting to look at all those historical times and see us in a therapy session with Freud himself.”
Nimrods
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Green Day takes brings the laughs in their new film, “Nimrods,” which releases in theaters Aug. 14.
Director and writer Lee Kirk explained Green Day’s writing credit on the film: “When Billie Joel and I started talking about the idea and kind of figuring out this story of these kids on a road trip to see Green Day, I realized, ‘We need a lot of crazy stuff to happen to these kids and a lot of fun antics, so what better source to go to than these three guys?’ So, I just started quizzing them about some stories and good stuff that happened to them. And then I took those and kind of folded them, twisted them into my fictional story.”
“We got a lot of the stories that parallel what our life was like back when we were touring in the van,” Green Day band member Mike Dirnt said. “Those are nice Easter eggs throughout the film.”
Walking Dead: Dead City
Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Lauren Cohan, executive producer Scott M. Gimple and showrunner Seth Hoffman sat down to talk about “The Walking Dead: Dead City” and reminisced on the origins of the hit franchise.
Lauren Cohan read for the role of Maggie back in Season 2 of “The Walking Dead,” but when Negan actor Jeffrey Dean Morgan joined the cast in Season 6, he didn’t know his role by name. “It was just ‘the big bad,’” he says. Now in Season 3 of “Dead City,” which premieres July 26, Cohan and Morgan’s arch-rival characters are working together. They might still want to kill each other, Cohan joked, but in a more sibling-like way.
“There’s so much history,” Gimple said. “There’s so much of an intersection between survival and assistance and pain. Survival, assistance and pain, that is family.” The new season doesn’t neglect that history, but shows an ability to not let the past define the characters, Hoffman said.
“It’s definitely a new dynamic this year in every way, which is pretty cool,” Morgan said. “It’s been especially fun for the two of us to play, as actors that have worked together for a long time.”
Silo
The cast of “Silo” joined Variety to talk about the current season and what fans can expect from the upcoming fourth and final season of the show, which was announced at San Diego Comic Con.
“It was like a long separation from a loved one, a friend, a partner,” Rebecca Ferguson said. Season 4 was filmed concurrently with Season 3 and will be released in summer 2027. Ferguson admitted she sometimes finds it confusing to differentiate what details are from the recently released season versus the upcoming one. “We just wanted to come out and release it,” she added.
“It was a great group of people,” creator, showrunner and executive producer Graham Yost said of the biggest takeaway from the show, which first premiered in 2023. “It’s a love fest,” Ferguson said. “We love coming to work. We love seeing everyone again.”
Reacher and Neagley
“Reacher” has reached Comic-Con.
Stars Alan Ritchson and Maria Sten, who’s starring in her own “Neagley” spinoff, reflected on the main series becoming one of Prime Video’s most-watched programs, earning 350 million viewers globally in 19 days. The show’s popularity stuck out to the actors, and Ritchson said the series was like “lightning in a bottle.” “I think that there’s something about ‘Reacher’ that is a bit of a social experiment. He’s a bit of a blank canvas, and people project onto him their own personal moral beliefs and ethics. They see in him who they want,” he said.
Season 4 of the show releases Aug. 12, and Ritchson said it could be the best season thus far, pointing out that they had more fights in the first three weeks of filming the season than all three seasons combined. “I think we’ve figured out what works about the show. We’ve elevated what I felt like we could improve on. The action to me was always something we could do better and fight really hard to do better every single season.”
John Cusack
Unlike most people in San Diego this past weekend, John Cusack was not at Comic-Con to talk about an upcoming film or show. In fact, the Golden Globe-award nominated actor is making his graphic novel debut with “Monos,” which involved nobody else in the production aside from him and his visual artist, Ignacio Noé. “I wanted to tell a story, but I didn’t want to negotiate telling a story, really,” Cusack said. “It’s kind of an anti-algorithm thing.”
“Monos,” which releases Sept. 29, is based on a true story,” following two fugitives in 1972 who come across an old artifact tied to TV icon Jackie Gleason. It’s a tale that involves aliens, conspiracies and Richard Nixon.
Cusack explained why adapting “Monos” for the big screen wouldn’t take much stretching, with a follow-up book to “Monos” already in the works: “It’s pretty much shot-for-shot the way I see the book and the film.”
Heads Will Roll
“Heads Will Roll” co-creators and real-life sisters Kate McKinnon and Emily Lynne talked Season 2 of their audio comedy and whether they would ever adapt the Audible original for the screen.
Season 2 released June 25 and featured guest stars like Patti LuPone, Laurie Metcalf and Carrie Coon. “My lips were sore from chef’s kissing,” McKinnon said of their performances. Adding more New York theater actors was one element of fan service the duo wanted to provide with the return to the world of Queen Mortuana and JoJo.
The two would love to adapt the series for film, television or even animation, but it would be an expensive undertaking. “There’s a lot of dragons. There’s a lot of castles,” McKinnon said. “Oh my god, it would be a nightmare, but someone should do it,” Lynne said.
