MANILA, PHILIPPINES – Finn Wolfhard who is best known for his starring role as Mike Wheeler in the critically acclaimed Netflix Original Series Stranger Things and as Richie Tozier in the blockbuster horror feature IT, now stars in Columbia Pictures’ Ghostbusters: Afterlife, opening exclusively in Philippine cinemas on Feb. 16.
Directed by Jason Reitman (Juno, Up in the Air) and produced by Ivan Reitman, Ghostbusters: Afterlife is the next chapter in the original Ghostbusters universe. In the film, when a single mom and her two kids arrive in a small town, they begin to discover their connection to the original ghostbusters and the secret legacy their grandfather left behind. The film is written by Gil Kenan & Jason Reitman.
Wolfhard joins Carrie Coon, Mckenna Grace and Paul Rudd in the lead cast.
“My daughter was thrilled when we cast Finn,” Reitman said. “He captures a generation in the way he talks, the way he looks. He has an incredible vulnerability for being a teenage boy, and that is a very unusual characteristic. He also happens to be as obsessed with the nuts and bolts of filmmaking as any young man his age.”
Wolfhard said he’s been a Ghostbusters fan since a very young age. “I think they’re timeless movies, because they are characters that everyone can relate to, and they’re such iconic performances so they’re hard to forget,” he explained. “My parents showed me those movies at a really young age, so I was lucky. But, then again, I don’t know a kid that’s my age that doesn’t know what Ghostbusters is. It’s iconic.”
Wolfhard said that his character, Trevor, is “a normal, awkward teenager. He’s a city kid from Chicago who gets evicted and ends up in the middle of nowhere – Summerville, Oklahoma. He’s shell-shocked, there’s no cell service, he’s annoyed about everything – until he finds a girl he falls for, and it all becomes worth it to him.”
Trevor, who is still too young to drive but is obsessed with cars, is the one to discover the iconic but long-abandoned Ecto-1 covered under a sheet in the barn. At first, he is the only one who knows it exists and begins to tinker with it to bring it back to life.
Though he didn’t get to physically drive the car, Wolfhard said it was an honor to interact with the iconic machine. “In one sequence, Trevor is in the Ecto-1 ripping through this giant wheat field,” he said. “He loses control and flies off and hits the road.”
Ghostbusters: Afterlife is distributed in the Philippines by Columbia Pictures, local office of Sony Pictures Releasing International. Use the hashtag #Ghostbusters
