The 'Good 4 U' hitmaker reveals her struggle with scary movies, admitting she was too frightened to watch the surreal tragi-comedy horror fronted by the 'Joker' actor.
- Sep 8, 2023
AceShowbiz - Olivia Rodrigo needed to "walk out" of new movie "Beau Is Afraid". The 20-year-old star confesses she struggles with horror movies, and she has described Joaquin Phoenix's surreal tragi-comedy horror - which was written and directed by Ari Aster - as a "bad acid trip."
"I convince myself that I see s**t after I come home from watching Insidious or something. Also, I watched that new Ari Aster movie 'Beau Is Afraid' and I got so scared. I literally had to walk out of the theater. I have never had such a visceral reaction to a movie in my life. It felt like a bad acid trip," she said to Phoebe Bridgers for Interview magazine.
Phoebe agreed, saying, "[It was] the scariest movie I've ever seen, but I was laughing the entire time." Olivia added, "That's the only reasonable reaction. Your body just can't process it. You have to laugh."
The movie - which also stars the likes of Nathan Lane, Amy Ryan, Kylie Rogers, Richard Kind, Michael Gandolfini, and more - focuses on "a paranoid man [who] embarks on an epic odyssey to get home to his mother."
The "High School Musical, The Musical, The Series" star isn't the only person struggling with the movie, and Phoenix himself previously warned viewers to "not take mushrooms" before watching.
He told Fandango, "I was told from someone in college that there was this college thread amongst friends, a challenge they were going to take mushrooms and go see this movie. And I just wanted to make a public service announcement and say do not take mushrooms and go see this f****** movie."
Meanwhile, filmmaker Aster insisted the movie "benefits from going back" for another viewing. Speaking to Empire magazine, he explained, "I don't think you quite know what it is until you've gone all the way through."
"I imagine that the second viewing would be hopefully rich in a way that the first one can't. It's designed to be wrestled with. I consider the film to be a picaresque, and I think part of that tradition is a certain irreverence towards the integrity of any sort of narrative structure. The film is designed to kind of shapeshift a lot."
