We’re keeping the Fear Street love alive over here at Collider. We recently had the pleasure of having Kiana Madeira on an episode of Collider Ladies Night to discuss her journey to the hit Netflix trilogy, and now it’s Olivia Scott Welch’s turn!
Welch’s star is currently soaring courtesy of the massive response to Leigh Janiak’s Fear Street films in which Welch plays Sam and Hannah. In Fear Street 1994, Welch’s Sam becomes the target of the Shadyside curse, with the Shadyside slashers refusing to rest until they’ve killed her. Then in Fear Street 1666, Welch plays Hannah, the pastor’s daughter who, alongside Sarah Fier (Madeira), finds herself at the center of a witch hunt.
It’s probably quite evident at this point that I’m a huge Fear Street fan and think the world of the performances in it. Yes, there is a good deal of Fear Street talk in our Collider Ladies Night conversation, but we also focused on the earlier gigs Welch booked that helped pave the way to her most recent accomplishments, like her appearance in a 2016 episode of Marvel’s Agent Carter.
Welch scored the role of a teen Agnes Cully, appearing in Season 2, Episode 4, “Smoke & Mirrors.” Yes, booking a role in a Marvel series is a big deal for one’s career, but the opportunity was particularly special to Welch as a member of a family of Marvel fans:
“My dad is a huge Marvel fan and a huge Disney fan, and so I remember we would go opening weekend to every Marvel movie. I guess Iron Man came out probably around the same time I started at like 11. So when I booked Agent Carter I was like, ‘This is the MCU!’”
As with all Marvel projects, the details are top secret, so Welch didn’t received her sides until the night before she filmmed. While one might suspect that and the scale of the project would result in sky high pressure, Welch was able to put things into perspective thanks to the experience she had filming a Nickelodeon pilot:
“I was like, ‘It’s Marvel. This is such a huge thing!’ But then I got to set for that and I had done a pilot for Nickelodeon earlier in that year, and it was really cool, but it wasn’t like [Marvel], you know what I mean? It was a Nickelodeon show and it was really fun and very cool and everyone was so nice, but it wasn’t the stakes of a Marvel project. And then working on Agent Carter that day I was like, ‘Oh, this isn’t so different than working on the Nickelodeon set.’”
The moral of the story? “It was kind of just a thing of, movies is movies.” Welch further emphasized the point by recalling a behind-the-scenes clip from Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope:
“There’s a video that I saw the other day from them filming A New Hope and it’s Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill and they’re running through a corridor and then George Lucas is like, ‘Cut,’ and then they’re like, ‘Can we go home? Was that good enough?’ And then he looks at it and he’s like, ‘Uh, the boom mic was in it,’ and they’re like, ‘Aw!’ And they have to do it again. And I was like, oh, movies are all just the same no matter what scope that they’re on, which I think is really cool. And that was something that working on Agent Carter I was like, this is really neat. It’s just people making TV at the end of the day, no matter what the IP around it is.”
So yes, it is all the same to an extent, but Welch also took a moment to highlight something special about the Agent Carter team's efforts that really struck her:
“It was so interesting to see all these people devoting so much time to something that was so beloved by the pubic, and that was something that was so interesting. The writers were so dedicated to the source material and the actors were so dedicated to portraying these characters that have been around for generations. So that was really cool and then just the scope of it was so grand and that was something that I was like, as unserious as it is, it is also so serious to make movies and to do things that are for the public and make people so emotional, you know what I mean?”
Looking for more from Welch? Stay tuned because we’ll have her full Collider Ladies Night interview for you soon! We discussed her experience working on Modern Family, her chemistry reads with Madeira for Fear Street, her hopes to direct and produce some day, and loads more!