Melissa Barrera Shares Big Career Goals After Leaving ‘Scream’

Melissa Barrera is ready to put her past in the past and continue the career that she’s been growing for over a decade. The actress recently spoke with Collider’s Perri Nemiroff during an installment of Nemiroff’s Ladies Night and shared her outlook on the future — specifically since parting ways with the Scream franchise late last year. For those not in the know, Spyglass Media, the studio behind the Wes Craven-created franchise, cut ties with Barrera at the tail end of 2023 after the actress shared a pro-Palestinian stance on her social media account. In an applause-deserving move, the In the Heights actress stuck to her beliefs and backed herself up in another post. Soon, Barrera will celebrate her latest project, Abigail, a horror flick that sees her re-team with Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, the filmmakers behind Scream (2022) and Scream VI, proving that she’s already taking big steps forward.

During her chat with Nemiroff, Barrera said that her goal for the next chapter of her life was simple:

“
Just continuing to put myself out there. Unafraid. Because I’m here to stay
. [Laughs] So just continuing to audition — I still have a lot of things that I wanna do. I have a lot of dreams that I want to accomplish — a lot of different movies that I want to do”

With her star on the rise, Barrera added that she hoped her time in front of the camera would eventually translate into more opportunities behind the scenes, as she shared, “I wanna produce, I wanna direct so there’s so much that I can busy myself with.” Leaving what happened with the folks at Spyglass in the rearview mirror, Barrera is ready to go full steam ahead and brush the negative energy off her shoulder. “Focusing on something that happened and that already happened and it’s not … It’s nothing … There are more important things that are happening in the world and that’s, you know, that was just a little hiccup. I’m good.”

How Melissa Barrera’s Publicity Team Helped Her Move Forward

Along with Abigail, Barrera is also attached to two other films awaiting their theatrical releases. The first, Caroline Lindy’s Your Monster, sees her appear opposite Tommy Dewey and Edmund Donovan in a romantic comedy-horror flick centered around trauma. The other, Kwame Kwei-Armah’s biographical drama, The Collaboration, which centers on the lives of Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, features Paul Bettany and Jeremy Pope in the roles of the art icons, respectively. While, at the end of the day, it’s Barrera’s talent that helped her bag these jobs, she gives massive kudos to her publicity team who have strongly stood behind her every step of the way.

“Actors aren’t the person you talk to, ever. You always talk to their representatives and that includes publicists, so
they are my face
, basically. They are an extension of me. So it’s really important, to me, that they are nice people, that they are respectful and polite, and that people like them and that they have a good experience with them, because that means that’s an extension of me …
We are on the same page in a lot of things
, and so I feel very, very lucky and fortunate that I have a great team all around.
My publicists have been incredible in the last six months of my life
, and it’s just been amazing to have that support, because it’s important.
It can be make-or-break for your mental health
to feel that your team has your back, or that you’re alone, [it] can be terrible.”

You can catch Barrera’s next rung on the ladder of success when Abigail bares its teeth in theaters on April 19. Learn more about the film here in our all-encompassing guide and keep an eye out for the full Ladies Night interview soon.

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