WIDENING THE RING
In “The Ring,” Naomi Watts played investigative reporter Rachel Keller, who is trying to unravel the mystery behind a deadly videotape in a desperate effort to save her own life and that of her young son. As Rachel delves deeper, she learns of the tragic story of Samara Morgan, a little girl who was left to die in a well by her adoptive mother, and discovers that Samara has somehow lived on, driven by vengeance to bring about murder and mayhem. The secret to escaping death at Samara’s hands, Rachel discovers to her horror, is to copy the tape and pass it on. With her son’s life at stake, Rachel makes a terrible choice.
Nakata offers, “‘The Ring’ ends with Rachel making a copy of the videotape to keep her son safe. But that means that she has spread Samara’s curse out in the world, so the curse does not end with the first movie. Now it’s two years later and Rachel has taken her son and moved to the small, pretty town of Astoria in Oregon. It looks peaceful—very quiet, very calm—but of course, it’s not peaceful.”
Naomi Watts comments, “Clearly Seattle was not the right place for Rachel anymore, so she’s moved to a place that feels more remote. She’s obviously changed on every level, living with this secret and this enormous guilt. What has she done? How much destruction has she caused? So she’s become a very isolated person and also incredibly protective. When it all started, it was easy for people to say she was not the best mother. She was a little self-obsessed and career oriented, but now it’s about holding onto her child. The irony of the whole thing is that this bad mother has turned into the kind of mother Samara is in desperate need of.”
“In fact, she is overprotective when we first see her with Aidan in this film,” adds Parkes. “She knows she is responsible for the evil thing she let out there, and the movie starts with it coming back to her in a terrible way. This time, as opposed to running away from it or pushing it onto someone else, she has to face the horror of Samara head-on herself.”
Watts agrees, “Of course she knows she is the only one who can handle it, because she knows what has erupted and how it has erupted in a way no one else would understand. She’s been going through a private hell, and it’s all about to unravel.”
“Naomi’s performance in this movie is very rich in emotions,” Nakata says. “As the heroine, throughout the movie, she needed to express fear and anxiety and at the same time be strong to face this evil character, and I think she did it perfectly. She was extremely focused and was very good at expressing the realistic emotions of a mother who has to face very unreal things to protect her son.”
David Dorfman returned to “The Ring Two” to play Rachel’s sensitive son, Aidan, who had a special connection to Samara in “The Ring,” but is now linked to her spirit in a much more menacing way.
MacDonald notes, “David had a much more challenging part to play this time because he is not just Aidan the sweet son; he becomes the embodiment of Samara, too. He had a very intense role to play, and he was more than up to the challenge. There was also a beautiful rapport that had grown between Naomi and him on the set. It really felt like mother and son.”
Dorfman says that dynamic was crucial for Aidan’s onscreen relationship with his mother. “Aidan’s relationship with Rachel is the only thing he has—not the last thing, but the only thing. He doesn’t have a dad, he doesn’t have any friends. All he has is his mom…and the haunting memory of Samara.”
Nakata states, “David Dorfman’s character was challenging because he literally becomes Samara…not instantly but gradually, which was difficult to play. The way we talked about each scene was, ‘Okay, Samara’s percentage meter is 25 or 50 or 75 percent.’ It was a simple way to describe it, but it worked. David is extremely smart and instinctive, and was also very prepared. He did a great job.”
“The way I thought about it was that I was playing a few characters,” Dorfman expounds. “I wasn’t just Aidan; I was Aidan, Aidan/Samara, Samara/Aidan and finally Samara, because throughout the movie, Samara is slowly but surely coming.”
Apart from Aidan, the only person with whom Rachel shares any connection in her new town is her boss, Max Rourke, who owns the local Astoria paper, The Daily Astorian, where Rachel now works. Max knows nothing of her background, but becomes increasingly curious and concerned as Rachel’s behavior becomes more suspicious.
Max is played by Australian actor Simon Baker, who admits that while he was not generally a fan of the horror genre, he had been impressed by “The Ring.” “The first film was a wonderful marriage of a horror movie and a personal human drama. The horror side has the eerie curse of the videotape and the human side was the strength of the mother/son relationship. I thought it was very good, which was a major reason I was interested in doing the sequel.”
In casting the role of Max, Parkes says, “We wanted somebody who could convey a kind of sensitivity to be open to what’s going on in Rachel’s life, as well as a certain strength so you could believe he might be able to protect them. Simon came in and read, and he intuitively had all of those qualities. I think he was also aided by the fact that he and Naomi are good friends, so there was an instant rapport, which translates on the screen.”
Baker remarks, “We had never worked together, but we’ve been friends for years, so there is an easy unspoken trust between us, which made for a more comfortable set. Naomi’s a lot of fun, which was good because it’s kind of a heavy movie. It was nice to offset that between takes with a few lighter moments.”
“It was really nice to be able to work with someone I knew so well,” Watts attests. “Simon is a great actor and he was perfect for the part. He’s a strong, manly guy, but there’s a gentle spirit to him, and in order for Rachel to trust Max, she needs to feel he’s a safe person. She senses he really doesn’t belong in this small country town either, so you sort of have two lost souls connecting in these strange surroundings.”
“Max and Rachel are both outsiders in the sense of this quiet, little town, even though my character was born there, moved away and came back,” Baker reveals. “He’s interested in why she’s even there and why she is so secretive and closed off, so he pushes to find out more about her. When she finally starts to reveal what’s going on, Max can’t believe what she’s telling him. It sounds like a lot of fantastical nonsense. It was hard to find that balance between, ‘Okay, girlfriend, you’re nuts,’ and ‘I care about you and I’m going to help you.’”
Max’s concern peaks when Aidan begins to exhibit mysterious symptoms that cause the doctors at Astoria Hospital to cast suspicion onto Rachel. Elizabeth Perkins appears as Dr. Emma Temple, the staff psychiatrist who is deeply troubled when Aidan is brought in with a dangerous and seemingly inexplicable case of extreme hypothermia.
As Aidan’s situation worsens, Rachel knows she has only one chance to keep her son out of Samara’s clutches. “Samara has gotten a lot smarter in finding a way back into Rachel’s life and has upped the ante,” says Watts. “Strange things are happening to her son and it becomes all too clear that Samara is not finished with them. From that moment, the objective is to discover where Samara came from and why she is out to cause so much evil and chaos. It’s apparent that Rachel needs to uncover every bit of information to get to the root of the problem…of where it all started.”
MacDonald adds, “Rachel comes to the realization that she cannot run…that she is going to have to take Samara on. The only thing she can think to do is to go back to Samara’s genesis, and in this case, she doesn’t want to find out about the woman who adopted her, but the mother who gave birth to her.”
Rachel’s journey leads her to a psychiatric hospital where she meets a mysterious woman named Evelyn, who holds the secret of Samara’s origin. “When we were developing the script, we knew Evelyn was going to be a key character,” says MacDonald. “It’s only one scene in the movie, but it’s an incredibly important one—all the elements of the story come together in that one scene.”
In what the filmmakers considered to be a casting coup, Academy Award® winner Sissy Spacek was set to portray the part of Evelyn, marking her first return to the horror genre since her Oscar®-nominated turn in the title role of “Carrie,” Brian De Palma’s 1973 screen version of the Stephen King novel. Parkes recalls, “When Sissy’s name came up, everyone in the room said, ‘Do you think it’s possible?,’ because she is not only an Oscar®-winning actress, but she also brings the classic connection to ‘Carrie’ for horror fans. But Sissy is a very serious artist, and she was great. One of the real highlights of this movie was working with her.”
“I was thrilled that she agreed to play the role of Evelyn,” Nakata states. “She is one of the finest actresses around and it was not an easy role. She is in just one scene, but she holds the biggest clue to how Rachel can deal with Samara. It’s a very quiet scene, but at the same time, very unsettling.”
Rachel’s search also takes her back to the creepy Morgan Ranch where she has a run-in with a local real estate agent named Martin Savide, who is trying to sell the ranch to an unsuspecting public. In one of the film’s lighter moments, Gary Cole, who is well known for his work in such films as “Office Space” and, more recently, “Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story,” makes a cameo appearance as the realtor who tries to hide the ranch’s history from Rachel, not knowing that she is all too aware of its gruesome past.
The main cast also includes Emily VanCamp, of the WB’s “Everwood,” and Ryan Merriman, who was recently seen in “Steven Spielberg’s Taken,” as teenagers who share a calamitous early encounter with the cursed videotape.