Exclusive: Holland Roden chats about Teen Wolf, her new film No Escape, and more

Actress Holland Roden chats about Teen Wolf and her new movie No Escape

Holland Roden is perhaps best known to audiences as Lydia Martin from MTV’s Teen Wolf. She became an instant fan favorite after playing Beacon Hills’ resident banshee for six seasons.

Roden now stars as Erin in the new movie No Escape. The thriller centers around a social media influencer and his friends who take a trip to Moscow in an attempt to get new exciting content for his vlog. But the trip might have more mystery and danger than they bargained for.

We got the chance to chat with Holland Roden and discuss her new horror movie No Escape as well as her time on Teen Wolf.

Read our exclusive interview with Holland Roden

Hidden Remote: I want to briefly touch on Teen Wolf, at the end of Teen Wolf Lydia and Stiles finally got together and walk off into the sunset. How do you think Lydia and Stiles are doing and where do you think Lydia’s at now?

Holland Roden: Oh, I don’t know, I joke that maybe they started a detective agency together and they’re finally being paid for their work in Beacon Hills! That’s what I sort of joke about.

Hidden Remote: Did your role in Teen Wolf prepare you for your new movie, No Escape? Since Teen Wolf could also get quite dark sometimes.

Holland Roden: I think as far as the stunts go, and a lot of the water work and night shoots, on No Escape we didn’t have a ton of them because we were interior. But yeah, I would say there’s definitely aspects of if you’ve shot horror before it helps you with the hours and the strenuous activity that is involved in shooting something like this. So I’d say it definitely prepared me in that respect, certainly.

Hidden Remote: And are you generally a fan of the horror/thriller genre? What drew you to this movie?

Holland Roden: I got the script, I get quite a few horror scripts, and I would just say content is key. I mean genre, it can be any genre. The Strangers, or Mother, or any of Jordan Peele’s work, prove that you can have an amazing script no matter what the genre is.  And Will Wernick was no exception. When my manager got the script and read it he passed it to me and said I really think this is something worth reading and I felt the same way.

It has a very realistic foray into the thrill ride, in the sense that these YouTubers – this is not an unbelievable scenario – that they’re shocking all, they’re always trying to raise the bar, and a group of friends try to throw a lavish birthday party for this guy for his channel and it all goes wrong. There’s been similar things to happen in real life so I really liked how organic it felt to have that horror situation feel real. So that’s what I would say is what drew me to the script.

Hidden Remote: So what can you tell us about your character and how she fits into the film?

Holland Roden: Erin is the voice of reason. She is the high school sweetheart of Cole and I like that my work with Lydia on Teen Wolf was slightly over the top, slightly stylized, because of who she was and this was a departure in the sense that I was just calm, cool, collected.

She was obviously part of a private Cole persona and she had seen this evolution of her boyfriend into this newfound large scale fame because of YouTube. I thought that it was just interesting to be sort of the anchor and the voice of reason throughout the movie. That I found just something different that I hadn’t been a part of before as far as acting a character in that way.

Hidden Remote: You were kind of talking about this earlier, about just getting a good script, but is horror a genre you’d like to continue to explore? Is there another genre you’re interested in trying?

Holland Roden: Honestly it comes down to script and character. Good script, good character, I’m on board. Whatever that leads me to. I would love to try more period pieces. I did a piece for Gale Anne Hurd called Lore where I played a real-life character called Bridget Cleary, one of the last accused witches of Ireland. Their Salem Witch Trials were like 300 years after us, in the early 1900’s, and so you could burn people in your home legally cause you thought they were possessed. I would love to work more with period but if it’s not a good script then I would go where the good writing is.

Hidden Remote: Is there something you found particularly challenging about working on a horror film like this?

Holland Roden: That’s where Teen Wolf really has trained us well. I know Dylan said that with Maze Runner the long hours on Teen Wolf prepared him really well for that. The chaotic get the shot before the sun comes up kind of thing. Horror really prepares you well for strenuous conditions, cold, dark, wet. And that’s just what you associate with a normal day at the office so it thickens your skin really well I would say.

Hidden Remote: Going off that, with horror the subject matter is kind of hard so how do you separate yourself from that after a day of work?

Holland Roden: I don’t know. I think it’s just some sort of subconscious muscle that you strengthen going from set to set.  The more you audition and the more you work it’s easier to turn off and on and it’s something that is hard for me to formulate into words versus just a feeling and a mindset. So it just becomes part of what you do and you just are really good at disassociating, which I guess could be a bad thing in certain circumstances!

Hidden Remote: No, it’s important to be able to disassociate from it at the end of the day! Cause I can’t imagine carrying it with you.

Holland Roden: Yeah, I would imagine. Actually I did shoot a movie in quarantine, we were back in Los Angeles. And I am now back in Wisconsin building a tiny house, and there will be nights when I am building alone where no one else is on the property and I’ve been having like Ted Bundy flashbacks. Even though I was the FBI agent, or I was actually the local law enforcement that she becomes one of the first female FBI agents in real life.

Clarice was loosely based on her and she’s still leading the bureau in Los Angeles and I did have – reading the Ted Bundy script definitely gave me the heebie-jeebies for sure. That’s probably the closest association I’ve made with my real life. But as far as escape rooms go I can leave the work at the office thankfully.

Hidden Remote: And have you ever done an escape room yourself?

Holland Roden: I LOVE escape rooms! There was an escape room I took my mom and my best friend and her mom to in Vienna, Austria which is where escape rooms were apparently born – the first one was in Vienna. I love game nights, I love puzzles, I love bringing people together. We talk about things we would never usually talk about and forming a different type of a friendship because you’re problem-solving together, so I love that escape rooms do that.

Hidden Remote: That’s awesome. And is there something you’re really excited for people to see in this movie? Or something you want them to take away from it?

Holland Roden: I think that there is such a thing as too much access and too much power. It’s not a theme that’s unfound on us, it’s not a new theme, but I think this is a really great way to project that theme through YouTube. Because that is the modern-day royalty of what kids aspire to be, are these YouTubers, and what can happen if you’re just given too much access and too much money and too much power. It’s obviously not a good thing.

Hidden Remote: To close out, what can we expect from you? Anything upcoming that you want people to know about?

Holland Roden: I have another movie, ironically another escape room movie, but very different in execution. Sony’s movie called Escape Room 2 in January. And I’ve got my YouTube series Hollandays that’s documenting my van build, my future home. And I just shot that Ted Bundy movie but I have no idea about the release date.

Thank you to Holland Roden for taking the time to talk to us about her new movie! No Escape will be available to watch in the US on Digital and On-Demand on Sept. 18, 2020.