After Mason Thames debuted his role as the live-action Hiccup in How To Train Your Dragon over the summer, the 18-year-old actor has two more 2025 movies coming out this month, The Black Phone 2 and Regretting You. Since he filmed them all basically back-to-back, it’s not surprising that the actor got his roles mixed up, and he has a funny story about the time that happened on The Black Phone 2.
The first Black Phone was Mason Thames’ first movie, which came out when he was just 14. When he was asked if it was tough to keep the character of Finney straight four years later, he had this to say:
How to Train Your Dragon was right before I did Black Phone 2, so I was talking a lot faster. I was still kind of doing the Hiccup voice. Because I was doing that for nine months straight. So I was kind of getting out of it, and Scott would sometimes, over his microphone, just go, ‘I hear Hiccup.’ And I’m like, ‘Ah! My bad, my bad.’ So I’d slow down my speaking and kind of get back into it.
Thames’ story, which he told to Dead Meat at the premiere of The Black Phone 2, is totally understandable considering he spent almost a year embodying Hiccup on the set of the live-action How To Train Your Dragon. As you can imagine, the kind of performance the director of How To Train Your Dragon would want from Thames would be rather different than how the director of the new horror movie, Scott Derrickson, would want to see. But hey, it totally makes sense that Thames needed to be reminded about it a couple times on set.
It’s pretty funny when you think about it, imagining Hiccup finding himself on the set of a completely different movie that is about a teenager being haunted by Ethan Hawke’s The Grabber, whom he killed in the first movie, but still haunts his dreams every time he closes his eyes. It’s also worth noting that the audience is completely different here considering The Black Phone 2 is rated R. It features Thames’ character smoking a lot of weed and dealing with the built-up anger and PTSD he has after the events of the first film, per Thames additional comments on the premiere’s red carpet.
The new horror movie is getting high praise from critics including through CinemaBlend’s own The Black Phone 2 review giving the movie 4 out of 5 stars for being “haunting, hypnotic” and surpassing all the reviewers “expectations.” You can see Thames in The Black Phone 2 now, and also catch him in the romantic drama, Regretting You in theaters on October 24.