Jessica Rothe has found her way back to familiar waters.

Christopher Landon’s Happy Death Day movies coronated Rothe as a scream queen and final girl at the end of the 2010s, but in the early 2020s, she opted to challenge herself outside the friendly confines of horror. She explored a wide variety of dramas — romantic, medical, sci-fi and crime — as well as an HBO Max half-hour comedy pilot and a dystopian action-comedy.

But by the mid-2020s, the current had carried Rothe back to the genre that embraced her the most. 2026 bears the fruit of that return, with five horror films — Affection, Imposters, Beware Boiúna, River and Pathetic Fallacy — either released in theaters or premiered at festivals.

“I did want to explore other genres. I wanted to stretch myself in those ways. But I am so happy to be back in the horror space, because [horror fans] really take care of their own,” Rothe tells The Hollywood Reporter. “Horror is also where some of the most exciting storytelling is happening right now. The five movies that have come out this year in some capacity could not be more different.”

Currently, the Colorado-born actor has Lionsgate’s Beware Boiúna in theaters. Directed by Mike P. Nelson, who is set to helm Saw 11, the creature feature stars Rothe as Alli, a med student whose humanitarian mission to the Amazon puts her group face-to-face with a mythical black serpent from Brazilian folklore. She’s joined by fellow final girl Kiana Madeira (Fear Street trilogy), who plays Lena, an Amazon native who becomes an invaluable guide to Alli’s group as they fight to make it out alive.

Rothe is excited to be part of a wave of scream queen team-ups this year, from Samara Weaving and Kathryn Newton in Ready or Not 2 to her other pairing with Jane Levy in River, which premiered recently at TIFF and is slated for a January theatrical release.

“All of these pairings are so exciting. It’s a beautiful thing that we live in a time now where there’s enough room at the table for two final girls,” Rothe says. “There can be two women who are strong and dynamic, who are, at points, up against each other or bumping heads, but have the same mission and goal.

Obsession was the talk of TIFF’s Midnight Madness last year, and River followed suit this year, selling for over $10 million despite already having a theatrical distribution deal with IFC/Shudder. The screening’s reception was so strong that nearly every major player entered the fray, driving the bidding to figures the indie distributor simply couldn’t turn down. Most notable of all, Jason Blum and Universal — Rothe’s Happy Death Day producer and studio — emerged as the buyers of the river-based slasher.

“I’m so flattered. I actually received a really lovely text from Jason [Blum] after the screening at TIFF. He congratulated me on the movie and everything,” Rothe shares.

Shortly after Happy Death Day 2U’s February 2019 release, Landon developed the shape of a more ambitious Happy Death Day 3, but the project ultimately stalled over what amounted to a budgetary dispute with Blumhouse. The powers that be balked at the sequel’s 48 percent drop from the first installment’s $125 million worldwide gross, which outperformed any and all expectations back in 2017. Still, Happy Death Day 2U grossed more than seven times its $9 million production budget, taking in $64.6 million — a margin that most current releases would pop champagne bottles over in today’s unpredictable post-COVID, post-strike marketplace.

So much of the industry’s box office reporting dwells on underperformance, but rarely does it stress the phenomenon of unrepeatable over-performance. Thus, treating the first movie’s haul as the new standard for future chapters was misguided, particularly when sequels have historically earned less than their predecessors. That reality has been obscured by the various 21st-century exceptions fueled by the expansion of global theatrical markets, particularly China, and the rise of serialized cinematic universes such as Marvel. (Even that franchise has since regressed toward the mean.)

In any event, Rothe is crossing her fingers that River’s January box office run performs well enough to reignite talks with Blumhouse and Universal about bringing Landon’s time-loop slasher franchise back to life.

“My hope is that River getting a longer life — and a life in front of a larger audience — is wonderful for every single person involved,” Rothe says. “And maybe that cup will runneth over and spill over into some good juju for Happy Death Day 3.”

As for the current state of Happy Death Day 3, also known as Happy Death Day to Us, Rothe reveals that she met up with Landon six months ago to reconceive the threequel around her character Tree’s post-college adult life. With seven years having passed since the sequel’s release, a time jump had become inevitable.

“Chris and I, back in March or April, actually met up, and we broke the story for the third film. Hopefully, if all the stars align, we get to shoot it in the next little bit. But even if we don’t, it’s not a story that’s going to time out, Rothe shares. “For the third film, it’s so exciting to really jump forward and see what’s going on with Tree and her life and if her life has gone how she thought it was going to go.”

The story may be retooled for a grown-up Tree, but it still retains much of what Landon originally envisioned seven years ago.

“A lot of those very, very early seeds that Chris had for the story are still in the new version. They are just incorporated in a slightly different way,” Rothe says. “But the overall premise of it and the big hook of it are still the same. It’s just that we’ve gotten more specific about Tree and who she is when we find her again and why having spent a little time away from her makes sense.”

Below, in a conversation with THR, Rothe also discusses shooting Beware Boiúna on the actual Amazon River and how her own backstory informed her portrayal of Alli.

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Congrats on the year of Jessica Rothe.

Thank you so much. I feel so grateful that all of these beautiful projects have bizarrely come to fruition at the same time.

It’s been a minute since I last caught up with you for All My Life in 2020, so I want to recap how you arrived here. The Happy Death Day movies turned you into a beloved final girl and scream queen, and while that genre tends to take care of the ones it crowns, I get the sense that you didn’t want to be limited to horror for a period of time. You spent a few years doing several other genres, but then it seems like there came a point where you realized, No, I should dance with the one who brought me.

100 percent.

Does that explain why you now have five horror movies either premiering at festivals or releasing in theaters this year?

It does — and that was a really beautiful and fun way to put it. As actors, we can only be so lucky to begin to choose the things that we work on. So often it is very much just, “Tell me where to be and I’ll be there.” But I’ve been lucky enough to get to a point in my career where there’s a little more choice, and I did want to explore other genres. I wanted to stretch myself in those ways.

But I am so happy to be back in the horror space, because I really do think that horror fans are the best fans. Like you said, they really take care of their own. Horror is also where some of the most exciting storytelling is happening right now. The five movies that have come out this year in some capacity could not be more different even though they all are within the horror genre. The one similarity is they’re all made by incredibly exciting filmmakers. They are all daring in their own ways, and they take chances alongside really interesting creatives. So that is always such an exciting turn-on for a project.

Where did Beware Boiúna fall on the timeline among Affection, Imposters, River and Pathetic Fallacy?

I shot [Netflix medical drama] Pulse, Affection, Imposters and Beware Boiúna pretty much back to back [in 2024]. I had a month in between Affection and Imposters — and then I had a week in between Imposters and Beware Boiúna. It was madness. Affection and Imposters shot on the East Coast during beautiful summer and fall weather. They felt like summer camp. Then I got whisked away on a plane to go to South America for Beware Boiúna, and I was completely immersed in the Amazon rainforest. It was such an incredible experience, and I really couldn’t have asked for a more beautiful bucket-list job to come my way.

I love that Beware Boiúna introduced your character, Alli, with her waking up on the Amazon River. Nobody has shot more waking-up scenes in horror movies than you.

(Laughs.) That’s so true.

Was it intimidating to shoot on the Amazon River since it’s such an unpredictable environment?

It was really intimidating but also really exciting. It was a huge reason why I took the project. The other reason was [director] Mike P. Nelson, who is not only an absolute genius, but he’s also genuinely one of the kindest humans that you will ever meet. It’s amazing considering his mind is clearly so dark and beautifully twisted.

But it was intimidating to shoot in the Amazon and to go to a country that far away from home where I didn’t speak the language. It was an incredible opportunity for me because my character Alli’s experience really mirrored my own. She is the audience’s window into this Amazon experience, as most people probably haven’t traveled down the Amazon River on a boat.

Every single morning, I woke up and tried new food and tried to improve my Spanish and made new friends and tried to not be bit by something poisonous. I tried not to step out of line in any way. So Alli went on a very similar journey, and it’s such a gift when parts of your real life mirror parts of what the character is also experiencing. There’s an inherent level of truth already there.

I never thought I’d ask you about your perspiration level, but here we are. You sweat a lot in this movie. Was that movie sweat? Or was that real-deal Amazon sweat?

(Laughs.) It was real-deal Amazon sweat. 150 percent. Every once in a while, they had to come in and take some of the sweat off because it looked like we had all been dunked in the river. When Mike and I first met to talk about this movie, he referenced [William Friedkin’s] Sorcerer as an inspiration, and it felt like kismet because I had just watched it for the first time a few weeks earlier. It has that patina of grime and sweat. You can smell and feel the jungle — and the humidity and the heaviness of the air. So that was something that Mike really strived to capture in this film, and lucky for us, the elements really helped in that way. I loved the opportunity to get a little down and dirty.

C’mon, you must’ve been miserable.

(Laughs.) I will say I normally hate being hot. I hate it. I’m from Colorado. I’m a mountain girly. I love the snow. I love the four seasons. But after a while, we got into the rhythm of it. You get so hot that it becomes the most boring thing that’s happening in a funny, weird way compared to the many incredible things happening around us. During night shoots, when it was still somehow a hundred degrees, we would see huge bats with translucent wings flying all around the crane lights. We saw monkeys on Monkey Island. We saw pink dolphins swimming in the Amazon River. We saw these beautiful butterflies. We saw walking trees that are trees native to the Amazon. Their roots actually move them slowly over time to find new sunlight. So I was just too preoccupied with my surroundings to be miserable.

Logan Marshall-Green’s character questions why Alli volunteered for this humanitarian mission in the Amazon. Do you think she had the purest, most altruistic intentions? Or was it ultimately self-serving?

I definitely think it was self-serving. One of the things I love about this movie is that there is no clear-cut good guy or bad guy. Everyone has their own motivations and agendas. Alli comes from a family of doctors. Her father is a very established, well-known doctor, which, ironically, mine is as well. It’s probably why I didn’t go into medicine. So she’s really looking to not only make her own name for herself, but also rebel. Her dad wanted her to go to Johns Hopkins [School of Medicine]. He wanted her to follow in his footsteps, and while she loves medicine and helping people, she wanted to do it her own way. So she’s running away from something, and [Kiana Madeira’s] Lena is also very clearly running from and to something. She and Alli bond over that.

She’s still a med student, right? I was a little fuzzy on what stage she had reached.

She’s still a med student. She’s very eager to learn. And what better place to learn than in a space where the resources of our first-world country aren’t readily available? She knows she’ll become a better doctor by having to problem-solve and think on her feet while helping hundreds of people with specialty cases. In the United States, you might only see five patients in a day. So I do think her altruism and self-interest can work together.

Hollywood has a history of similar projects overlapping with each other. You went through a heartbreaking version of that last year when Pulse, Netflix’s high-profile medical drama, had the misfortune of premiering a few months after The Pitt.

(Laughs.) Yes.

So was everyone relieved when the new Anaconda turned out to be a meta comedy and not some hardcore snake movie like Beware Boiúna?

I think so, but the funny thing is, we didn’t really talk about it much. We knew they were filming around the same time as us. And just from the casting, we knew that tonally it would probably be different, though you never know. Jack Black may have wanted to make something really gritty, which I’m here for. I love Jack Black, Paul Rudd and Thandiwe Newton so much. What a dream cast. But it’s cool that there’s clearly something in the ether. People want creature features. People were craving a big snake movie, and what a joy for us to be able to provide two completely different types of films for people to seek out, depending on whatever your flavor of the week is.

Even Affection had its own version of that with Obsession. They both premiered at festivals within a month of each other, and they both have similar titles and dudes-who-go-too-far themes.

Unintentional overlap is a weird thing. It really is. I like to think of it as, in our creative world, there is a collective mind. We respond to things that are happening in the world around us, and that’s what gives birth to these projects. I don’t know if it’s similar conversations, what’s happening politically or simply the movies we grew up with that are now inspiring this generation’s filmmakers. Or maybe it means that we’re all trapped in a simulation, and it’s just starting to regurgitate all of the same stuff over and over again. (Laughs.) But I’m here for it. It will make for some really fun double or triple features down the line. People can be like, “Let’s go watch all of the big snake movies at once,” or, “Let’s go see all of the movies about men taking it too far.” Maybe werewolves or vampire bats are next.

I was all set to throw some playful shade at Blumhouse and Universal for denying the world Happy Death Day to Us and Freaky Death Day. But they just acquired your other river-based horror movie, River, for a handsome sum out of TIFF, so now I have to be bitter and grateful. Are you flattered that they wanted to get back in the Jessica Rothe business?

(Laughs.) Oh, I’m so flattered. I actually received a really lovely text from Jason [Blum] after the screening at TIFF. He congratulated me on the movie and everything. River director Josh Giuliano is working on his next film [Occupant] with [Blumhouse Atomic Monster]. I had reached out to Jason to tell him how insanely talented Josh is. I was like, “Clearly you know this already because you’re already in business with him, but he’s superb. He truly is.” So work begets work, and my hope is that River getting a longer life — and a life in front of a larger audience — is wonderful for every single person involved. And maybe that cup will runneth over and spill over into some good juju for Happy Death Day 3 and Freaky Death Day.

Yeah, when River comes out in January, hopefully it does well so all of those Chris Landon-universe conversations can restart. He told you the story for Happy Death Day to Us a long time ago, but then the two sides couldn’t agree on a budget. Well, now that it’s been seven years since Happy Death Day 2U came out, do you think that Happy Death Day to Us story would still work if a time jump was added to account for all the time in between?

The story has now evolved further. Chris and I, back in March or April, actually met up, and we broke the story for the third film. I was so honored that he even wanted me to be a part of that process, because he’s a genius and one of my favorite humans in the world. So we sat down and broke it, and it makes complete sense.

Hopefully, if all the stars align, we get to shoot it in the next little bit. But even if we don’t, it’s not a story that’s going to time out. There is no [mandatory] timeline in terms of when it makes sense for us to make this movie, and that’s one of the things that I love about it. The first two movies work so beautifully as back-to-back companion pieces. But for the third film, it’s so exciting to really jump forward and see what’s going on with Tree and her life and if her life has gone how she thought it was going to go.

We made both of those movies pre-COVID, and like a lot of people, my life has taken so many twists and turns, not just because of COVID, but for a large part because this huge thing happened in our world. So the third film taking a moment to pause and say, “Are we all where we thought we would be? How do we feel about that? What would we change if we could?” — that’s a really exciting and interesting place to start from.

So you scrapped the previous iteration of Happy Death Day to Us …

A lot of those very, very early seeds that Chris had for the story are still in the new version. They are just incorporated in a slightly different way. But the overall premise of it and the big hook of it are still the same. It’s just that we’ve gotten more specific about Tree and who she is when we find her again and why having spent a little time away from her makes sense.

Pairing you and Kathryn Newton in the potential Landon-verse crossover of Freaky Death Day makes so much sense from an actor and character standpoint. Freaky writer Michael Kennedy actually pitched that idea before pairing scream queens became all the rage. Radio Silence has since teamed Kathryn up with Samara Weaving in Ready or Not 2, and you got paired up with Jane Levy for River and Kiana Madeira for Beware Boiúna.

I would love to pair up with Kat. She is so insanely talented, and I would be beyond honored to share the screen with her. Steven Schneider is the producer on both River and Pathetic Fallacy, and when he called me about River, he said, “The interesting thing about this is pairing you and Jane together. You’re both scream queens, and it almost becomes larger than the sum of its parts. There’s something really huge and exciting and fun about two final girls existing in the same space.”

So all of these pairings are so exciting. Kiana has also said this in interviews, and I think it’s true, but it’s a beautiful thing that we live in a time now where there’s enough room at the table for two final girls. There can be two women who are strong and dynamic, who are, at points, up against each other or bumping heads, but have the same mission and goal. So it brings twice the fun and twice the scares and twice the exhilaration for audiences.

Rivers have been a theme in your post-COVID work. You were on a show called Virgin River, then the Amazon River of Beware Boiúna and the titular river in River. Even Affection had a symbolic shot at the end involving a river.

Yeah, water is a big one right now, which is interesting because I’m a Gemini, and air is my elemental sign. I should probably go get my cards read and ask, “What’s up with all this water stuff?” For River, I took swimming lessons because I’m not the best swimmer in the world. I was like, I’m going to be spending 14 days in the water. I need to work on this a little bit. Even Pathetic Fallacy has a big water scene. At the end of the movie, there’s a very important scene in a lake.

Sometimes things find you that you’re supposed to examine in yourself, confront or spend more time looking at. And while each of these projects had its own individual qualities, clearly water was a big one. So, it’s the year of the water.

I suppose we could widen it to Mother Nature in general. What was frightening about the Brazilian folklore of Beware Boiúna is that She does not care who you are if you’re upsetting her natural balance. To her, the humanitarian doctors are no different from the capitalistic developers.

Yeah, Mother Nature is wild and chaotic and unpredictable, and She doesn’t really care if you’re good or bad. She is just trying to survive. Even though one’s a slasher and one’s a creature feature, Beware Boiúna and River both have an interesting parallel in that something almost larger than life and unstoppable is pursuing our lead characters. Every single character is just trying to survive, be it a snake or a masked man or a sister or a med student on the Amazon River. We’re trying to do our best to keep our head above water. It goes well for some of us, and it does not go so well for others. Ultimately, death is coming for all of us, and it’s so terrifying that we never know when and how. So confronting that fear is one of the reasons why we love watching these movies.

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Beware Boiúna is now playing in movie theaters.