Shannyn Sossamon stars as Beth Raymond, a woman who sees two of her good friends die just days apart from each other, in the creepy thriller One Missed Call. To make matters worse, Beth knows both friends received horrifying cell phone messages detailing their last moments in the days prior to their deaths.
It’s enough to make you never want to turn on your cell phone, but even taking out the batteries won’t stop that ‘one missed call’ message from popping up. Yet starring in One Missed Call hasn’t changed Sossamon’s opinion of her cell phone. “I think it’s very useful,” said Sossamon. “I need it. I love it when I need it, but I’m not scared to turn it off.”
Sossamon doesn’t believe in ghosts but does think what happens in the film could occur in the future. “I do believe that the human mind has the potential to go that far with it one day, I don’t know if we’ll be alive for it, but I think that it could almost go so far as they went in the film, travel through phones, and spirits and stuff. I don’t know what we’re capable of. I mean, look at what we’ve already done from the beginning. I believe in the energy being strong enough. I believe in magic.”
Director Eric Valette didn’t ask Sossamon to watch horror movies to get into the spirit of the film, but he did give her a specific instruction regarding the other One Missed Call movie. “He told me not to watch the original One Missed Call,” said Sossamon. “That’s all he told me because he didn’t watch it and he wanted to treat it… I don’t think that’s that rare. I think it’s a director’s decision in the case of a re-make to handle it all in [one of two ways]. ‘Let’s all watch it and really be passionate about the first one and trying to re-make it,’ or ‘Let’s act like it doesn’t exist and do it our way.’”
And they didn’t turn to the original source material - Yasushi Akimoto’s novel - to assist in bringing this One Missed Call movie to life. “Nobody even knew that there was a book,” admitted Sossamon. “It’s so different. I think there’s something to be said about treating it like it’s brand new. It’s one thing if you’re trying to re-make the movie exactly like it. Then you do all your research. But why do all that research if he doesn’t want to stay true to it? It seems like it just convolutes your head.”
We discover in One Missed Call that Sossamon's character, Beth, has a history of abuse. “I didn’t have to go that far for the research on abuse,” said Sossamon about that aspect of her character. “I think that’s something that a lot of children can relate to. Maybe not as brutal as her mother was doing, but that’s not far for me to go. However, I’d never been a psychology major but I understood why she might subconsciously choose psychology for her choice of study because I think, subconsciously, that she was doing was she was maybe not wanting to deal with her let’s say crap, for lack of a better word. So, it’s almost like if you study psychology and you know everything, then you’re like, ‘I’ve got it all figured out and I’m fine. I don’t have to deal with anything.’ I think it’s like kind of a guard thing. [It’s] self-help but not helping herself at all, not addressing any of those issues.”
Building up to the right level of intensity for the film was difficult, and it wasn’t easy for Sossamon to turn it on and off on the set. “Something like this, the tension level has to be so high that I found it was actually difficult to get everyone to just like try to be not as tense as I had to be. It’s nice when they quiet sets down, even if it’s just like 10 seconds before a take,” explained Sossamon. “It’s like, ‘We need tension in the room! Let’s have 10 seconds of silence, even not while the camera is rolling.’ The tension has to be so thick without words or anything, which is so hard to do. It’s interesting. It’s challenging work.”
It didn’t help that Sossamon’s co-star Edward Burns did his best to make her crack up. “There were times where I had to go, ‘You need to go over there,’ and I asked them to put duct tape on the camera box for an eye line, seriously, because I would look in his eyes and [when] I looked in his eyes I was just like, ‘Oh sh--, I’m going laugh.’ And it was just laughing, and it would be a take where I had to be like freaking out and so terrified, it was horrible.”
Aside from the fact he liked to make her laugh at inappropriate times, Sossamon says she loved her time on the set with Burns. “It was like we just totally hit it off, same sense of humor, laughing, totally great, just laughing, laughing… I know that doesn’t sound like very detailed or interesting, but that’s exactly what it was. We were just laughing. He just had to sit there and I would laugh. He has a contagious ‘something’. It’s like he has like funny in his eyes, you know what I mean?”
In addition to acting, Burns writes and directs. The two One Missed Call stars discussed the possibility of working together again on one of his films. “It did come up a little bit,” said Sossamon. “Maybe. I would love to. I feel like I would be good in one of his things, because I’m kind of neurotic and kooky. I feel like it would work somehow.”
Another project she wouldn’t mind adding to her slate is a sequel to One Missed Call. “Oh, I would absolutely want to do a sequel. I would want a second shot chance at Beth Raymond. I don’t know where it would go; it could go in a bunch of places.”
