It’s Halloween week, which means it’s a great time to catch up on the 2025 movie releases fit for spooky season. One movie I don’t think got enough credit when it hit theaters in the summer was M3GAN 2.0, which got overshadowed by the success of F1 and other blockbusters. When CinemaBlend talked to the sequel’s writer/director Gerard Johnstone about the making of the movie, he gave us some great insight into the new villain character of AMELIA.
I don’t know about you, but I had a blast with the Blumhouse feature, which I wrote in my M3GAN 2.0 review, and I know I wasn’t alone in, considering what my colleague also wrote on it and the 83% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. One aspect that really stuck out to me is the new character of AMELIA, chillingly portrayed by Ivanna Sakhno. Here’s what Johnstone said:
Ivanna has this incredible kind of grace and stillness, and the same economy of movement that Megan does, because they both come from the same code. So they’re kind of like two versions of the same creation in a way. But with Ivanna, we had our theories coming into it, ‘That you’re a robot, so I don’t think you’ll emote too much’, or ‘I don’t think you’ll be really restricted’. But then, you watch [the performance] and it’s like, ‘Oh, it’s kind of boring.’ So, we worked on how when she does emote, how does she emote?
Sakhno’s performance was so good that it made me want to do a double take about whether she was actually some sort of android. But, as it turns out, finding the right tone for her character was simply a balance of the actress and Johnstone trying to find the right way for AMELIA to come across. As he continued:
Maybe what’s interesting about her is that, because she’s gone rogue, she’s actually struggling to contain some of these emotions that she has. And she is an infiltration android, so she has kind of like human characteristics and stuff, but as she’s processing various things and she’s, she’s really on the edge… So there’s a, this is kind of a question mark over her sanity a little bit.
The writer/director also noted that they employed the use of movement coach Luke Walker, who also taught the actress behind M3GAN, Amie Donald, how to move like a robot for the first movie. Walker, who is also a stunt performer, dancer and martial artist, played a robot himself in the Netflix movie I Am Mother. Johnstone also shared this:
That allowed us to kind of figure out a character that was just really intense and that she has this incredible quiet intensity and she really feels things on an emotional level. And it’s funny, it was almost antithetical really to what a robot should be, but it worked really well for the character.
They definitely fooled me with Ivanna Sakhno’s AMELIA. The sequel follows Allison Williams’ Gemma and her niece Cady following the events of her invention M3GAN going rogue. When they find out that someone got their hands on her blueprints for M3GAN and made AMELIA out of it, they have to recruit M3GAN to help them survive.
When the movie came out, it was perhaps a surprise that it has more action than horror, but as Johnstone also told us during our interview, he wanted to do something “no one is expecting” and take some “wild swings” with the franchise. Now that M3GAN 2.0 is on streaming, you can watch both the theatrical version and the R-rated uncut version. Enjoy your Halloween viewings of the Blumhouse release!