‘The Strangers – Chapter 3’s Madelaine Petsch on Saying Goodbye to the Brutal Reboot Trilogy

The Strangers – Chapter 3 is about to hit theaters and, while it’s not the only horror sequel to be unleashed in 2026, it’s arguably one of the more ambitious. Inspired by the 2008 movie of the same name, it’s also not the only horror revival that fans will be seeing in the coming months, but rather than being the next installment in a long-running series, director Renny Harlin did something a little different: he shot three films back to back to back. In this sense, this The Strangers trilogy feels as ambitious as something like Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Over the course of three films, fans have witnessed Madelaine Petsch’s Maya be put through the ringer, facing one type of terror after another in an extended stretch of nightmarish brutality.

While reflecting on the production with MovieWeb, Petsch cited some of the more challenging tasks as an actor:

“In the original Slovakia shoot, the boar fight day [seen in The Strangers – Chapter 2], everyone thought we had scheduled a full two days for that, which is still not a lot of time for a sequence like that. And then, three days before, I was looking at the schedule and I was like, ‘Wait, [producer] Courtney [Solomon], it’s like a quarter of a day.’ So we had to fight to get a half a day for that. So having to rush all of that and get everything in with the physicality and all the emotions was so much pressure. So that was really hard and physical.

“Then, in this third movie, there’s the whole motel sequence when we have people, other people, strapped to chairs. That actress who is crying in that scene committed that way the entire 19 hours. She deserved all the flowers in the world. I was so impressed with her. That was ringing in my head when I got home that night and it made me feel crazy. I was like, ‘I don’t know how people play serial killers,’ because I had that one break in that scene, and I was like, ‘This is f*cked up. This makes you really feel crazy.'”

Personally Investing in the Experience

Given the intensity of the shoot and how much time she invested, Petsch was far from phoning it in with the trilogy. In fact, she collaborated with the filmmakers to contribute to the movie’s script, injecting more of her own perspective into what she saw for Maya.

In speaking to how she contributed to the script, Petsch admitted:

“I think it was the framework of what they wanted … the beginning, middle, and end of the story was there, but they really hadn’t dived into the character at all. I think sometimes horror films really do rely on story and villain and not on protagonist and backstory and depth a lot. That works, which is crazy, but it was really important to me as the person bringing this person to life that there was a level of depth and understanding that the audience can feel and resonate with her journey in a way that wasn’t necessarily on the page before.

“So really taking those moments of loss and growth and grieving. I fought really hard to keep that sewing-up scene in [The Strangers – Chapter 2] because I think watching her choose to fight, to survive, to sew herself up, that’s a crazy choice to make. I also fought to keep it – it was originally an 11-minute scene. It was cut down to 45 seconds, and I was like, ‘No, no, no, we need two and a half minutes of this. I want the audience to feel the discomfort that she feels.’ It’s important that we’re on this ride with her the entire time or else it just doesn’t work, to do three movies. I think the most important thing to me was carving out, ‘What does Maya’s story look like and how do we get audiences to understand the depth of what she’s going through in her pain?'”

Even though Petsch will be leaving Maya behind, she won’t be putting the entire experience behind her. While reflecting on what she personally learned from playing Maya, the actor noted, “Resilience, honestly. I think there’s a level of human strength that I never really understood before. I’ve always been like, ‘Oh yeah, if I got put in that situation, I’d probably die.’ And I’m like, ‘I’m sure she probably said that about herself as well before she started this crazy journey.’ But I think the resilience of the human being is a really incredible thing.”

She added, “Her tenacity and her will to live is insane. I think there’s a level of tenacity I’ll take away from her, and also, she doesn’t really panic at all. She was very … although all of these things are really crazy that happened to her, there’s a lack of panic from her and I think that I could really use that because I’m a very anxious girl.”

The Strangers – Chapter 3 hits theaters on Feb. 6.