David Gordon Green’s Halloween trilogy may be coming to a close for Andi Matichak with Halloween Ends on October 14th, but between her work ethic, passion, and lessons learned from the legendary Jamie Lee Curtis, Matichak is bound to make the most of even more big screen opportunities moving forward.
A first lead role in a Hollywood feature doesn’t get much bigger than this — playing Laurie Strode’s (Curtis) granddaughter in a Halloween film. Four years later, Matichak has starred opposite Curtis in three Halloween installments, with Halloween Ends marking an especially big shift for her character. In the 2018 film, an innocent and unknowing Allyson came face to face with her grandmother’s boogeyman, Michael Myers. Then in Halloween Kills, she was inspired to step up and join the fight to take him down, losing her mother, Karen (Judy Greer), in the process.
Halloween Ends begins four years after that blood-soaked encounter. Allyson’s built a life with her grandmother and works as a nurse in Haddonfield. Both seem to be in a good place given the horrors they’ve survived, but their situation becomes quite complicated when Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell) steps into their lives. He was accused of killing the boy he was babysitting on Halloween night in 2019 and now, even though he was acquitted, he’s still a town pariah. Initially, Laurie is eager to help Corey when he’s bullied and is in favor of the budding romance brewing between him and Allyson, but then something changes. Laurie notices something concerning in this local outcast, but despite her warnings, Allyson opts to pull away from her grandmother and veer toward Corey instead.
With Halloween Ends hitting theaters and Peacock on October 14th, Matichak took the time to join us for an episode of Collider Ladies Night Pre-Party to revisit her journey to one of the most iconic horror franchises of all time.
While Matichak’s acting career is currently soaring, there was a point in time when she was determined to reach the highest possible level of success in a completely different field, athletics. Matichak is also a gifted soccer player. She explained:
“I think second grade is when I started playing club soccer, so I was really young, and I knew in second grade I wanted to play at a Division 1 school, top 20 program. That was the goal and kind of the dream, and anything past that obviously would be epic, but that was the stage, especially in women's soccer at that time. So I dedicated my entire life to that and that's why I didn't really have time for anything else.”
While the main focus was soccer, Matichak did eventually make the decision to carve out some time for a special modeling opportunity — the chance to work in Greece. “I got the opportunity to go to Greece and the reason I took it is because I knew that once I was in school, I wouldn't have a chance to travel.” She added, “I wouldn't get these other experiences that a normal student would because I would be a collegiate athlete at a top-tier school.”
So off to Greece Matichak went and while there, yet another opportunity presented itself, one that would demand she let the college soccer scholarship she worked so hard for go. She continued:
“When I was there I met somebody that kind of saw something and was like, ‘Well, what about acting? Modeling might not make sense. Soccer, there might not be that much longevity in that. What about acting,’ and then made the connection with [the] agents [I have] now in New York. I met this person at my agency here and we hit it off right away. It’s not like we could talk about acting because I knew nothing about it, so we just connected as people.
He got me training in Chicago for the last semester of my senior year. I was graduating early to go down for spring season. In that time period is when I started really diving into the craft and working with this incredible coach, Kathryn Gately. It was all Meisner study, so that was kind of what the basis foundation of what I've studied is. And so I worked with her really closely and it was clear quite quickly that the opportunity I had in New York was very specific, and at a high level where it actually could be something that could turn into something, and also that I really enjoyed doing it. There was a moment where I was like, wow, a lot of my personality started making sense. A lot of a lot of my exploration of self kind of started to make sense. It felt very right. And it was definitely a premature decision. You can't make a decision that big in a matter of like a month. But I also had a lot of respect for my coaches and the program that I had signed on to play for down in Florida, and so it was important to me to not try to do both things and do them mediocrely, but to pick one and really go for it.”
That approach paid off big time. After making appearances on a handful of shows, including 666 Park Avenue, Matichak scored the opportunity to join the Halloween family and learn from one of the best of the best, Jamie Lee Curtis. Matichak recalled:
“You have the ability as number one to really dictate how the day’s gonna go and your energy says a lot about you and about the space that's gonna be created to create in. And Jamie, I've never experienced somebody that generous and open. She just would give so much. Her first day on set everyone wears name tags and by the end of production, she knows everybody's name because she's like, 'If you know my name, I should know yours.’ And so there's a camaraderie and a team mentality to her, which I never really felt on sets before. And coming from a team sport, that's like the dream is feeling like you kind of have this family that you're able to create with.”
Not only has Matichak made the most of the opportunity to create alongside industry heavyweights like Curtis, Greer, and Green, but she also went above and beyond with her personal character work. During our conversation, Matichak recalled how, due to the pandemic, the release of Halloween Kills and the start of production on Halloween Ends were delayed. That meant she had far more time than expected to sit with the material before filming. She explained:
“We had a lot of time to just kind of sit and marinate on the script before we started filming, which can go one of two ways. [Laughs] But one of the things that I did that was very helpful is I got a journal and I just started journaling as Allyson. Like every couple days, I would put in entries. And so I started to kind of figure out the flow of what her journal entries were for each year. That was very helpful to understand her, and there was a lot of day-to-day things and mundane things that kind of come up and then depending on the scene, I would go back and read those journal entries on set.
What was very, very weird and very cool and made me feel like we were really making something special and we're all meant to be doing it is one of our writers, Paul Logan, he's actually doing the novel for Halloween Ends this time around, and so he was there writing the novel the whole time, and we started talking about the journaling and he and I made up multiple key moments in this woman's life that were exactly the same. It was as if we verbatim wrote them together, and it was really like, ‘Wow, clearly we're on the right path here and we're making the right choices.’ But I think all of that lives in you and lives in your body and when you meet Allyson in Halloween Ends, she's looked at as this kind of heroic survivor in a way and all that pain, all that trauma, everything is still underneath and David Gordon Green allowed for a space for us to kind of look under the surface and see what's really there.”
Eager to hear more from Matichak on her journey in the industry thus far and her experience working on the Halloween franchise? You can find just that in the video version of her episode of Collider Ladies Night Pre-Party at the top of this article or in audio form below.
Finally, if you’d like the opportunity to have a virtual meet and greet Laurie Strode herself, Jamie Lee Curtis, Universal has teamed up with Meta’s Messenger, Instagram, Horizon Worlds, and Creative Shop to give one very lucky fan the chance to do just that! Here are the details on how to enter to win:
Meta’s Messenger, Instagram, Horizon Worlds, and Creative Shop have teamed up with Universal Pictures’ HALLOWEEN ENDS to provide one lucky fan the opportunity to attend the first-ever virtual meet ‘n greet with Jamie Lee Curtis in a custom-built Halloween Horizon World. Fans can join the final fight today by building their own custom #KillerReels on both Messenger and Instagram. To enter, head to the @HalloweenMovie Facebook page and click ‘Send Message,’ or send a DM to @HalloweenMovie on Instagram and follow the prompts from there!