Meghann Fahy and Brandon Sklenar play a pair on a first date gone very wrong in Blumhouse’s latest thriller, “Drop,” which had its world premiere at Austin’s Paramount Theater on March 9 at the SXSW TV & Film Festival. But the duo and the event couldn’t have gone more right.
In one of the loudest receptions of this year’s SXSW premieres, the crowd loudly applauded multiple times throughout the movie, which follows Fahy’s Violet as she’s on a first date with Sklenar’s Henry. During the date, she begins receiving threatening drops sent to her phone, threatening to kill her son and sister. Soon, she’s tasked with the impossible: murder her date. The film leans heavy into the drama and forces the audience to suspend belief in the thrilling third act, but the beautiful filming style and twisty mystery makes that all the more possible. Plus, Fahy is in every single scene of the movie, making it impossible to look away.
Directed by Christopher Landon, the film was produced by Jason Blum, Michael Bay, Brad Fuller and Cameron Fuller.
Following the screening, the audience erupted into applause and stayed seated for the Q&A with Landon, Fahy and Sklenar. When asked about the physicality of the role — there is quite an action sequence, hinted at in the trailer, that Violet and Henry are thrown into — Fahy joked she worked in the gym quite a bit. But in reality, she learned from the stunt team.
“They took really good care of me. It was my first time doing a lot of this stuff and it was an incredible learning experience. It was really hard hanging out of that window in the harness,” she said with a laugh. “There was one day where I was like, ‘You’ve gotta put me back down on the ground.’”
“She loves the harness. She loves flying around in that thing. It’s really comfortable,” Sklenar quipped. Fahy quickly responded, “You couldn’t get me out of it!”
She also found an emotional connection to the character. “I loved her immediately and I just thought it was really beautiful the way that they sort of wove in her past experience. Something Chris and I talked about was how sort of uniquely suited she is to be in the situation that she’s in,” she said on stage. “I was immediately smitten with her.”
Despite the film focusing on random drops and threats, Landon, Fahy and Sklenar all answered “no,” when asked whether it has changed their own relationships with their phones at all. “It’s getting worse by the day, actually,” said Sklenar, who most recently starred alongside Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni in “It Ends WIth Us.”