Transforming into the titular ballerina vampire out for blood in Abigail, 14-year-old star Alisha Weir stunned her friends and family.
“They were pretty shocked, especially when they saw all the blood,” the Irish actress tells PEOPLE, adding, “I was getting messages saying, ‘I don’t know if I’ll be able to see you the same after seeing the trailer!’ ”
In the new horror film, Weir, a breakout as the lead in Netflix’s 2022 movie-musical Matilda, stars as Abigail, the pre-teen target of kidnappers seeking ransom. The band of misfits soon realize, though, that they’re trapped in a mansion with a centuries-old lethal vampire forever stuck in a child’s body.
She bites, beheads, stabs and bursts through doors, often drenched in blood throughout the film and dropping F-bombs. It was all “so much fun and really crazy” for Weir.
“There were so many cool parts. I think one of them would have to be the blood cannon, for me. Me and [costar] Melissa [Barrera] had a big blood cannon at the very end of the film, and you could only do it in one take. We were both really nervous because we didn’t want to mess up since it would’ve taken a long time to clean it all up.”
And, the young star points out, fake blood is “quite hard to clean off.”
“At the end of the day we’d have to use bottles and bottles of shaving cream and as the movie goes on … by the end we were so covered in blood, all you could see was our teeth and our eyes. We had to get straight into the shower to wash it all off.”
Her vampire look, of course, included a set of sharp fangs, which Weir says were “like retainers” she’d take in and out for each take.
“It felt super weird, especially when I was talking … and also because I had an American accent, which I had to get used to as well,” says Weir. “I also had stunt teeth, which were even bigger than those normal teeth. They were like gum shields and took up most of your mouth.”
Weir counts herself a horror fan — though, she says, her only exposure to the vampire genre before doing Abigail was Vampire Diaries — and she wanted to participate in a scary movie for one simple reason.
“I always wanted to know if the people that are scaring the audience are really scared when they’re filming it,” she says, “and it was the complete opposite. It was so much fun every single day. It was not scary at all.”
Weir, who guesses the cast and crew were maybe “a little bit scared” of her while in character on set, adds that she got used to being in her terrifying makeup.
“When I first looked in the mirror, it was so much fun to get to see myself transform into someone that I didn’t look like. But then, because I looked like her so often, I got so used to wearing the teeth and the contacts and being covered in blood every day that I didn’t even mind it.”
Abigail is in theaters April 19.
