Goosebumps Finale: Justin Long Talks Taking Inspiration From Tom Hanks And Absurdity Of Bratt's 'Deal With The Devil'
The following contains spoilers from the Season 1 finale of Goosebumps... reader beware!
With the ghost of Harold Biddle finally free from Nathan Bratt's (Justin Long) body, the town of Port Lawrence at last had its happy ending, right? Wrong. Dead wrong.
In Goosebumps' Season 1 finale, we finally learned all about Slappy's morbid past when a mortally wounded war soldier invoked an evil spirit in order to stay alive. But after a scuffle between the sorcerer and Mahar, the doll-maker forced to build Slappy, Kanduu's soul was then transferred into the puppet, and that's how life was breathed into the formerly inanimate ventriloquist doll.
After Slappy tricked Bratt into digging up Kanduu's body in the present, the sorcerer walked the town once again, turning its residents into dummies so he could complete his evil plan: Unleash hell upon the world so that humanity will unite against a common enemy, thus, eliminating all wars. But along with Bratt's help, the kids were able to distract Kanduu long enough to reverse the spell that initially saved his life, at last putting an end to the sorcerer and the dark magic that plagued their town for years. In the season's very last seconds, it was revealed that throughout all of the magical hoopla, the evil spirit possessed the newly freed Bratt who — let's be serious — kind of deserved it.
Below, Long talks to TVLine about the reason Bratt dug Kanduu up, the role that horror has played in his career, his love for physical comedy and what he'd like to see in a potential Season 2.
TVLINE | You have quite a few horror titles in your filmography. What's your relationship to the genre in general, and what draws you into twisted stories like Barbarian, Drag Me to Hell and now Goosebumps?
JUSTIN LONG | A lot of it was chance. I didn't really make a deliberate effort to do more genre movies. As a fan, as an audience member, I've always loved horror. When I was a kid, we weren't allowed to watch R-rated movies and I remember going to the video store and just being so intrigued by all those great '80s horror covers. I loved all that artwork and I wondered what I was missing out on. When I'd see Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warrior with Freddy's glove and all the teenagers, I was scared of it, but I was also really intrigued by it.
So it's ironic to me that now I'm making these horror movies. I think a lot of it is not being able to watch them, I grew a sense of curiosity about them. I find that as an actor, there's quite a bit of freedom in playing some of these roles in a horror movie because there are things that happen that are so far outside the bounds of reality or any of the experiences that I've had, so you get to fill in a lot of it with your imagination.
TVLINE | How well-versed in the Goosebumps world were you when you took on this gig?
I'm embarrassed to say this but not well-versed at all. I had not read any of the "Goosebumps" books. I think I missed out on the phenomenon because I'm 45 years old. My mom taught junior high school English so it was huge in her world. I remember hearing a lot about them when the whole craze happened in the '90s, but I think at that point, I was just a little too old.
But I'm well-aware of how significant their impact was and I would see it every time I crossed the border because we were shooting in Vancouver, Canada. Whenever I talked to one of the customs agents, they had a very authoritative tone and they're very straightforward. [They'd ask] "What job are you working on?" And I'd say "Goosebumps," and their faces would light up! [In a Canadian accent] "Oh, hey, Goosebumps! Oh, I've gotta tell you, I love Goosebumps!" I saw them kind of regressing a little bit to their teenage excitement. So it was not lost on me what a responsibility we had to tell these stories as best we could.
TVLINE | What was it about your character Nathan Bratt or this particular story that made you want to dive into R.L. Stine's world?
It was as simple as, "What would it be like and how fun would it be to explore somebody who is possessed by a teenager?" Big has always been such an inspiring movie to me. Tom Hanks in Big is one of my favorite performances of all time, so I loved the idea of getting to do a version of that. I rewatched it a bunch of times and studied him in that and what had been lost on me in his performance was just how physical it is. It's subtly physical. He really, in a full-body way, inhabits a kid, and the way he carries himself and holds his head a little slumped and fidgets with his sleeves. He doesn't know what to do with his hands. I just loved all those little touches and committing in that way to a character. I love the physicality of it. I love old-school physical comedy. I grew up watching Charlie Chaplin, John Ritter, and Laurel and Hardy.
TVLINE | This role was loaded with physical comedy. How were you able to avoid on-set injuries as you were throwing yourself into lockers and slamming your head into things?
I've always prided myself on being able to throw my body around. Even when I was a kid, I was short for my age and I would get into fake fights in school and I'd have other kids pretend to hurl me over desks and stuff. It got me attention, which I liked, and it was something that the cool kids thought was funny. I remember playing dodgeball and having the ball hit my head so many times they didn't want me to drive home. And there were other stunts and things I enjoyed doing. The next day, I bounced right back up.
This was the first time that I really felt it. I really felt the consequences of mistreating your body because I'm not a stunt person. I've been doing it so long that I think it finally caught up to me. Fortunately, I found a great chiropractor in Vancouver and a great place to get adjustments and massages, but I needed that for the first time. But still, I loved getting to commit to the physicality and getting to throw myself around. It was fun to try and find the truth in it.
TVLINE | It seems like you had an absolute blast in this role. Do you have a favorite scene or sequence from this season, and if so, what made it so memorable?
I loved walking through the classroom halls. That was kind of a last-minute inclusion because it was going to be the spirit of Biddle goes into me and I'm immediately Harold. There was no transitional period where it's taking over my body, so they wrote that in. While we were shooting, that was an addition that I was grateful for because I loved getting to play with that down that hallway, and what that would feel like to have your body inhabited by somebody else. I thought it was funny. It was a challenge too, to throw my body around, and we mapped it out. I had always heard that Michael Richards did this [on Seinfeld]. He was very specific with all of his physicality, and the same with Mark Linn-Baker and Bronson Pinchot on Perfect Strangers.
I did a play with Mark and I said, "Why don't we try one where the door just hits my [face] when you open it?" It was a real farce, and he said, "No, no... well, let's rehearse it." And I said, "Let's just try it!" He goes, "We said that once on Perfect Strangers. Bronson and I said, 'Let's just try it,' and I ended up losing three teeth and he ended up breaking his nose," or something like that. There were real consequences to it. The point is, I learned from those guys that you can't just throw yourself around without having real choreography. So that was fun to map out with Erin [O'Malley], our director, and to employ some of those bigger moves that I would often do to make people laugh [earlier] in my life.
There was one episode where I had to go in and out of the body and again, it always really helped to be specific with the whole body and to consider how a teenager carries himself versus an adult. I remember before work one day I saw this teenager crossing the street to get to a bus stop and he was kind of loping forward, and I just started taking note of behavior like that, which was really fun to try to recreate.
TVLINE | After being possessed by the ghost of a dead kid, Nathan still reaches to the supernatural for help in writing his book's ending. What was going on in this guy's head when he started taking orders from Slappy? Is it pride, greed, desperation...?
I think it's all of those things. And yes, it's a ridiculous thing to do. It's absurd that he would then just, what you said, continue to seek out the help or advice from this dummy. It was important that that motivation was really clear. I think he just makes the classic deal with the devil. And why do people make those deals? Is it because they have a desire, an attachment to something? You had to see that Nathan was very passionately wanting something, in this case, to be a celebrated writer. It's his ego, really. So that was something that we wanted to make clear, because you're right, the stakes had to be high enough so that he would go to these lengths, and he has to regret it. He has to see the effects, the consequences of making this Faustian deal. That's what was fun in the last episode, to explore his shame that he has from that.
TVLINE: How was it working with the Slappy doll? Does one ever get used to acting opposite of inanimate objects?
I am weirdly used to it and part of it was because the puppeteer, Keith, was so good. Once in a while he would forget a line, the puppeteer — because he's got all this stuff to do and on top of it, he's got lines — but it always made me laugh because Keith would go, "Oh, yes! Sorry about that!" and he would apologize as the puppet. It was such an extension of him. But because he was so committed, it made it easier to commit to it being an actual thing.
TVLINE | Bratt doesn't seem to be out of the woods just yet. The season ends with him seeing Kanduu in the mirror looking back at him. Have there been any talks about a potential Season 2 yet, and if not, do you have any hopes or wishes for what you'd like to see?
I haven't heard any plans, but I think it'd be fun to explore him being taken over by a totally different type of character. In this season, it was a teenager who is confused and angry and not necessarily sinister. I don't think he's a bad kid, he's just trying to figure it out and is maybe reactive and wayward. But it'd be fun to explore a truly malevolent person. Someone who's just dark and maybe a sociopath. But I don't know. It's also Disney, so I don't know how dark they want to go. I would just be happy to get to play around with that creative group again.
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