Halloween Kills featured a lot of nods to the 1978 original Halloween, bringing back characters from that groundbreaking film to examine how the past 40 years have treated them. But one fan-favourite character didn’t make the cut, for obvious reasons: Lynda, played by P.J. Soles, who meets her demise at the hands of Michael Myers while talking to her close friend Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) on the phone.
In a new interview with Yahoo Entertainment, Soles looks back at some of her formative films (and shares an anecdote about almost being cast in Star Wars). Of Halloween, she recalls not wanting Lynda to die because she was having such a good time making the movie. “I knew it was my last scene, so as I’m falling out of frame, I just kept grunting. John [Carpenter] had to say ‘Cut,’ because I wouldn’t stop! I didn’t want it to end. That was three weeks of pure joy. Jamie was 19, and Nancy Loomis [who played Annie] was the same age I was. We all looked so young back then. Lynda was a great character to play because I was a straight-A student and I certainly didn’t smoke or have any boyfriends. So it was enjoyable to to play her.”
Nick Castle — who returned to play Michael Myers for key moments in Halloween Kills — was the man behind the mask for Soles’ death scene. “He was tickling my neck with the phone cord for the first take. We did three takes,” Soles recalled. “For the first two takes, at least, I’m not very good for dying. I kept telling Nick, ‘You’re going to have to pull a little tighter.’ He was like, ‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ and I said, ‘You’re not going to hurt me. I’m supposed to die and you’re tickling my neck!’ So he did it a little harder. I did have to act a lot of that.”
Soles did have something to say about the fact that Lynda meets her doom after fooling around with her boyfriend — who also falls victim to Michael’s murderous ways. It’s a story choice that soon became a slasher-movie trope. “I’d rather be known as the girl who says ‘Totally,’ all the time,” she said. “[We were] really just good kids. We were just goofing around! We didn’t deserve that.”
The whole interview, which focuses mostly on Carrie, is well worth a read; head to Yahoo Entertainment to check it out.
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