‘Smile 2’ director says sequel inspired by Amy Winehouse, Whitney Houston

As long as Hollywood has been in the business of manufacturing entertainment, it has also produced a string of meta-commentaries examining how toxic public obsession can dim even the industry’s brightest stars. From fictional tales like Sunset Boulevard, Birdman, and this year’s The Substance to reality-based documentaries about ill-fated icons like Amy Winehouse and Whitney Houston, investigating the why of it all has long played as a self-reflexive exercise on screen. And yet, you’ve never seen a topical probe quite like Smile 2, which plunges a horrific, razor-sharp blade right into the flesh of its own audience — and scares the s— out of them, too.

“I wanted to raise the question, did we do this to Skye? By us coming back for a Smile 2, have we done this to her?” director Parker Finn explains to Entertainment Weekly of star Naomi Scott’s Skye Riley, a pop music megastar battling demons (both literal evil entities and grim secrets lurking in her past) as the public largely stands by and watches with their iPhones up and recording.

For answers, there’s no better place to look than in the recent past. Setting the stage for his ultra-famous subject, Finn says he wanted to take the story in a completely unexpected direction for the sequel. The first film starred Sosie Bacon as a therapist ensnared in a sinister curse, which sees a mysterious entity inhabit its victims, torturing them into dying by suicide. Naturally, whoever witnesses the suicide becomes the entity’s next host.

While he admits he never expected to continue his intentionally “self-contained” Smile beyond the 2022 original (a runaway hit with $217 million in global ticket sales on a minuscule $17 million budget), once he got word that the studio was interested in expanding the story, he pushed his curiosity to the limit.

“When I started thinking about ideas, early on, any of the ideas that started coming to me in the first month I was thinking about it, I threw them away. If I’m coming up with these too quickly, they’re too obvious; it’s too expected,” he recalls. “I wanted to push for something where people would be like, ‘I can’t believe this is where Smile went.'”

Finn found inspiration through his intense research into tragic pop star tales, particularly members of the “27 Club,” a group of notable figures who died at age 27, including Winehouse, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, and more.

“Certainly, Amy Winehouse was on my mind. Britney Spears, of course. We did a little tiny nod in the film; they mention that Skye is 27, which felt apropos to the character,” Finn says of the Whinehouse, whose highly publicized issues with substance abuse and overbearing associates preceded her untimely death in 2011. “Certainly those tragic stories, I was watching everything I could: documentaries, interviews, essays, articles, even Whitney Houston; there were a lot of women I was looking at who get destroyed by this process. I didn’t want to point to anyone in particular; I just wanted to take that, glean it, and filter it into this unique character.”

Skye navigates a path toward sobriety and a planned comeback tour one year after she was seriously injured in a car accident that killed her actor-husband (played by Ray Nicholson). Her larger issues, though, stem from her own doing (she’s a self-destructive, emotional wreck), as well as mounting pressure to maintain composure in the spotlight from her momager, played by an ace Rosemarie DeWitt with devilish, subtle intensity. And then there are the fans — the intrusive, obsessive, overbearing fans whose grabbing hands send a shiver down Skye’s spine but whose vital dollars fuel her mother’s relentless greed.

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Smile 2 builds to a jaw-dropping conclusion that smashes together all of those ugly bits plaguing Skye’s life for the entire world to see and serves as the “exploration of the downfall of this pop star who’s unable to overcome the things that have been put upon her,” Finn says. But, while all eyes might be on Skye, Finn’s film doesn’t let us off the hook — both for Skye’s sake and the aforementioned celebrities whose fates played out on stages both real and metaphorical.

As big of a production as the movie (and its ending) is, Finn sees a simple question at its center: “‘Are we complicit in this?'”

Smile 2 is in theaters Friday.