Ashley Greene is proud of her new horror film, It Feeds — but shooting her first movie after giving birth wasn’t always easy.
“This [movie] was tough for me because it was my first movie post having my little girl, and I think we were six months in, and so I’d been on set for the longest that I’d ever been on set,” Greene, 38, exclusively told Us Weekly. “I was breast-feeding, and so I was pumping on set and your hormones are going everywhere. And then I was, like, having to go home to this little angel and try to separate these two things. It really was challenging for me.”
In the supernatural thriller, Greene portrays Cynthia, a clairvoyant mother who is on a mission with her daughter, Jordan (Ellie O’Brien), to save a girl named Riley (Shayelin Martin) from a demonic entity. While having to balance new motherhood — Greene gave birth to daughter Kingsley, whom she shares with husband Paul Khoury, in September 2022 — with such a heavy role was admittedly “hard” for Greene, she used the character’s strengths to help her along.
“Thankfully, I think, with Cynthia, you can always find stuff that you can use to your advantage also vs. letting it work against you,” Greene explained. “And so I said, ‘This is really hard for me, but I’m gonna find a way through it and I’m gonna use this, these moments when I’m on set.’ It’s one of the things I’m most proud of coming out of this project.”
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“Thankfully, I think, with Cynthia, you can always find stuff that you can use to your advantage also vs. letting it work against you,” Greene explained. “And so I said, ‘This is really hard for me, but I’m gonna find a way through it and I’m gonna use this, these moments when I’m on set.’ It’s one of the things I’m most proud of coming out of this project.”
One of the film’s overall themes centers around the battle against one’s deepest traumas, as director and writer Chad Archibald created the story after both his parents were diagnosed with cancer. Greene, who has been open about her battle with anxiety and panic attacks over the years, said she immediately understood the layered representation and believed she could do something “powerful” with her performance.
“When you’re ready, I think you have to look inside of yourself and you have to face your demons and you have to be able to allow yourself to have the strength to overcome things that have happened to you, not because of you,” she explained. “I loved that throughout the course of the film.”
In juxtaposition to the empathetic Cynthia was Greene’s costar Shawn Ashmore as Randall, the father of the possessed Riley who has a more extreme (and violent) approach to saving his daughter. Like Greene, Ashmore used his own experience as a parent to place a human and empathetic spin on his character’s motives. (Ashmore and wife Dana Renee welcomed their son, Oliver, in 2017.)
“I’d never looked at Randall as a villain. If we were watching this movie through Randall’s perspective, he would be the hero,” Ashmore, 45, explained to Us. “He’s making horrible choices, but I understood the bad choices he was making, because he is in an impossible situation. He’s just watched his wife wither away from a circumstance that he cannot understand as he starts to grasp that he’s now at risk of losing his daughter. I just looked at him as a loving father who is doing anything that he can.”
Ashmore said he had to figure out how to “reconcile” how his character could make the decisions he does without being an “evil” person at heart, which is where being a father himself became crucial to his process.
“When I really started to think about his circumstance, and if I was in that circumstance, what would I do? I would do anything to protect my son,” he explained. “And he’s not doing the right thing, but he’s doing the only thing that he knows how to do in this impossible situation that he’s being put in.”
Ashmore hopes when people see the film that they lean into the “great thrill ride” It Feeds provides while also recognizing the complexity — and intelligence — of the characters on screen.
“In genre films, it’s so frustrating when you [can] tell the characters are making the decision to further the story or to put a character in a bad or a perilous position. And I never, ever felt that way when I read [this script],” he explained. “And then when I watched It Feeds [and then] characters make bad decisions …. I completely understood why.”
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He added, “I think that’s a distinction specifically in horror movies, where, if a character’s making the decision just to further the plot or to put themselves in peril, that’s a bad writing choice as opposed to, ‘We understand who this character is and that the choice of they’re making is true to who they are.’ And I think that this film is full of decisions and actions like that. And I think that is great storytelling.”
Greene, for her part, wants It Feeds to provide plenty of supernatural fun while also holding up a mirror to viewers.
“What I loved about Cynthia and Jordan is that once we see Cynthia grappling with past traumas and things that had happened to her — [but] when she realizes that she has to overcome those things to help her daughter, she does it no questions asked and is able to do that for someone else,” she told Us. “And I think that’s what we are as a society, right? When you heal yourself, you have the ability to heal others too.”
It Feeds premieres in theaters and on demand Friday, April 18.
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