Actress Leah Pipes says that her character, Jessica, is the “Queen B” of the upcoming remake of “Sorority Row.” But the b in question isn’t a bee but instead a word that rhymes with “rich.”
Pipes tells SciFi Wire that it’s her character who comes up with and sells the idea of a prank that results in the death of a sorority sister and then covering up the crime rather than going to police not only to her fellow cast members, but also the audience.
“”I had to really figure out what she was saying and what she was really saying is, ‘This just happened.’ You can see in the scene, at first she does freak out,” Pipes says. “It’s a freaky thing and I needed to show that, I felt, that it does hit her but then she just stops and she wipes off her tears and she says, ‘Get me out. Get me out of this situation. Get me out of what comes from this situation. Not everyone else, just me.’ So she has to convince everyone around her and I played that scene very much in my own head, where she’s not really noticing the other girls and what they’re going through. It’s very much all about her, as it always is.”
However, this being a horror movie, things don’t stay buried for long.
“I think that she isn’t there,” Pipes continued. “She’s not in the situation. She’s not really experiencing it. All she’s seeing is the way out and she has her goal and she’s very focused on that. I don’t think she’s evil. I didn’t see her as evil. I saw her as very determined.”
No matter how many sisters die in Jessica’s attempts to cover her tracks, it never occurs to her to just stop and go to the police. The killer has phone video of the sisters’ prank and evidence they buried with Megan, but Jessica still thinks there’s a way out for her.
“Yes, and every problem she’s just trying to fix,” Pipes said. “She wasn’t trying to say, ‘Oh, woe is me. How are we ever going to do this? People are dying.’ It was like, ‘I’m going to ignore death. I’m going to ignore all this tragedy and I’m going to get out of this.’ Of course, in the beginning of the film, you do see that she is a b*tch. She will play tricks on people and I think she’s just so intelligent and bored that she likes to toy with people. She likes to be manipulative and see what she can make people do. It’s not necessarily evil. I just think she’s so intelligent that she actually finds most people very boring.”
“Sorority Row” opens in theaters Friday.
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