The week before Scream 7 was widely released in theaters across America, V spoke to 25-year-old actress Isabel May over Zoom. She had just arrived home from a long day of press for her role as Tatum Evans, the badass daughter of Scream final girl Sidney Prescott. May takes a sip of coconut water and settles into her at-home interview space, complete with a professional microphone people use for podcasts. May doesn’t have a podcast, but I can’t help but think she should start one after our enlightening conversation about storytelling. 

With seven acting projects lined up for the future, Isabel May was recently deemed one of the “hottest young stars in Hollywood” according to The Hollywood Reporter. She is a refreshing presence in the industry—the actress has no form of social media, rides horses in her free time, and is trying to earn her license as a pilot. In her downtime, she loves consuming stories of any form and hanging with her dog—a standard poodle named Joni. 

Below, V spoke with May about portraying multi-dimensional characters, working with mentors like Taylor Sheridan and Kevin Williamson, dream book-to-screen adaptations, and her resolute journey as an actress.

V Magazine: I wanna start with ‘Alexa and Katie.’ Something that stuck with me is when Katie had her first panic attack…what kind of headspace did you go into, and what did it feel like to have that medical phenomenon be represented? That’s not often shown on a kid’s show, but it’s groundbreaking, honestly. 

Isabel May: I’d gotten really close to the creator, Heather Wordham. Going into it, we had dinner, and she opened up the door for me a little bit and said: ‘If there’s anything you wanna explore, any thoughts or ideas that you have for Katie.’ You know, these two seasons have been primarily about, very importantly, Alexa’s trajectory (of cancer) and what she’s gone through medically, which was so challenging. And so she just said: ‘I think this kind of opens up the door for us to be able to explore outside of that. Like, how do you live life post that, in a way?’ And the thing that felt organic was anxiety. The way I played that character, she was always very anxious—she had a divorced mother and didn’t have a father figure in her life and felt pressure constantly to amount to something.

I love researching, and I worked on that with Heather pretty intimately and kinda came up with a whole story arc. She totally let me into that world and let me have an opinion and an idea about this character I’ve been playing for a couple of years. I remember I was walking anxiously around the parking structure outside of the studio a lot. It’s early morning. It was my first opportunity to do something like that as an actor. We’d only been on a sitcom for two years and played the jokes. I really wanted to do it sincerely. And then I listened to crazy music and got myself to this point where I was literally about to hyperventilate. They said, ‘Action,’ and then I quite literally had a panic attack in a way. My whole body was covered in goose—they’re not goosebumps, but you know when you’re sewing something? If you take a needle… and you press it all over your skin hundreds of times? It felt like that very strange sensation. It was my first time being able to do that on camera, and I went, ‘Oh, I think I have a knack for this…drama thing.

V: Taylor Sheridan reached out to you and wrote a character for you exclusively to play after you got rejected from one of his projects. Walk me through that moment because I bet that was monumental for you.

IM: I had a very small resume at that point and I tested for a series he did called Mayor of Kingstown. I found out I hadn’t gotten it the next day, but I knew I’d really delivered the goods. There are plenty of auditions you do as an actor throughout your career, where you’re just like: ‘That is not my best work.’ But there are other times when you can really say with confidence, you did something really well. You grabbed your heart, you ripped it out of your chest, you put it on the ground, and you said, ‘Here, this is what I can do.’ And I felt I had done that. 

He wrote a letter saying, ‘This is the last time you will ever audition for me. It’s my job to find you a role now.’ I got a call two weeks later. He was gonna write me a role for a series he hadn’t written yet. And then he described the role, and I went, ‘Oh, this sounds too good to be true.’ It was my first time totally submerging myself into a foreign environment, into a character—being able to, given the tools to do so. It was really transformative and incredibly inspiring. I’m unbelievably grateful that he took that chance and committed to me in that way.

V: Did he offer you a piece of advice that you’ll always keep with you?

IM: He said, ‘The line goes through your head, and then into your heart, and then it goes out your mouth.’ And for some people, it goes into their head and then out their mouth. In an odd way now, I think about that every time I say anything, I just think, ‘Am I feeling it, too?’ I think about that a lot. I always try to apply that, especially as someone who’s continuing to grow in their acting resume.

V: You have so many projects lined up. It’s crazy!

IM: Yeah, seven. I don’t even know how that happened—there was a point when I could only say one or zero. So that’s why I think I find some pride in being able to be like: ‘Yeah, I worked really hard.’ Plenty of people work very hard and diligently and they inspire me to do the same. But I like to give myself that credit at least, you know. I worked eleven out of twelve months last year. I’m incredibly grateful that I was able to. 

V: Do you ever get tired or worn down? How do you keep up that stamina?

IM: I don’t think I can do that every year—I had something called endometriosis that I just had surgery for. I thought I was tired for no good reason, just because I was working. And I learned that the fatigue with endo is the equivalent of three days of no sleep. I always bemoan the fact that I was so inflamed and tired. I’m worried that it reflected in all of the films I did last year, but screw it. It’s okay. Can’t all be perfect. 

V: That’s such a warrior move to be like: ‘Oh I have endometriosis and I’m casually working full time.’

IM: I didn’t even know I had it. I just feel so lucky that I got to work through that. But I think just generally working that hard, no matter if you have any sort of illness, doesn’t matter. It’s a lot on the system. So I think… go get a massage. I keep telling people that, and they’re always like: ‘Well, I haven’t earned it.’ Go get a massage! It’s an hour or forty-five minutes. It’s not a big deal, and you get your feet rubbed, and it makes a huge difference! I schedule massages for the people in my life all the time because they won’t do it to themselves. That’s what I’ve leaned heavily into using that as a form of therapy.

V: Let’s dive into Scream VII—the girl that you play, Tatum, I get the sense that she’s obviously a scream queen. She shot Ghostface in the trailer, so she’s really badass, honestly. How’d you prepare for that role and did you watch any horror movies that inspired your performance? 

IM: So I’m not trying to tell people that I didn’t watch Scream like there’s any sort of pride around it. It was just me being a pansy; I was just a little fearful of it. But then, I have to admit, I have genuinely fallen in love with it and become kind of a rabid fan a bit. Now I wanna know all the trivia, and I kind of like when people give me trivia because I understand why there’s this legacy element to it, and people have so intimately experienced their lives alongside the films. 

When I got involved, I knew that Kevin (Williamson) said that it was because he saw 1883, and then a year later, he asked me to sit down, have a Zoom with him, and talk about this. He said that whatever kind of depth and seriousness Neve (Campbell) has, not only as an actor but as a person, he felt that I similarly had, which I thought was interesting. We kind of mirrored each other in our own unique ways.

And then I tried to consume as much horror as I could. You know what I did? I just watched every Wes Craven film I could get my hands on. I didn’t really pay attention to anything other than, ‘What has Wes done?’ It felt like he was there, even though I’ve obviously never met him. But the number of times Kevin kind of always gets teary-eyed when he talks about Wes Craven and this really beautiful thing. You could tell that there was something happening between Neve and Kevin the whole time, which felt like a really impactful, almost kind of Matrix-y experience. You go back thirty years, and then you jump here, and could you ever imagine that sort of thing? I wanted to be a part of it because it felt like it had Wes’s imprint. This entire Scream franchise is the brainchild of Kevin Williamson.

V: Tatum is the same age her mom was when Ghostface first appears. I’m wondering, how is Tatum both similar and different to her mother when she was seventeen? 

IM: That sort of the seriousness of the character, that’s how Sidney sort of felt compared to all these characters around her in the original film, who were all loud and quirky and had different characteristics. She felt kind of grounded in depth and I think that Tatum is very, very similar, naturally. But the difference ultimately is that Tatum knows she might be the age that her mother was, but she also knows what her mother went through very intimately. 

It surrounds her constantly, but the one person that she can’t talk about it with is her mother. Kids can be juvenile and obnoxious, but I think they have more intellect than we kind of credit them with sometimes. And I think that you can tell that Tatum knows what the missing link is and in a way, is maybe a step ahead of her mom in that way. And then her mom meets her halfway towards the latter parts of the film, and they come together. But I like that ’cause it’s not the stereotypical daughter just trying to be difficult for the sake of being difficult. Right? It’s grounded and rooted in something real. 

V: Obviously, you love to read, and in the film and TV industry, it’s very prominent that everywhere you look, there’s a new book to screen adaptation everyone’s talking about. As someone who loves to read, I’m wondering, are any book-to-film adaptations that you would love to be a part of or that you would love to be seen made into a screen production or a theater production? 

IM: Goodness! Gosh, there’s so many. There’s one called ‘Playing to the Gods’ about Sarah Bernhardt, that I just finished reading that I became quite obsessed with. She was the first celebrity actor on stage, and her life is really interesting. It’s her rivalry with this other actress named Eleonora Duse, who’s arguably the creative force behind method acting.

One of my favorite books ever is ‘Great Expectations.’ I think I’ve read it a thousand times, and I know they’ve sort of done an adaptation of it. But I would love to see a new one and a fresher one. I just could read that book a million and one times.

There’s one called ‘Geek Love’ by Katherine Dunn. I believe Tim Burton has wanted to get that made—That absolutely should be imagined onto the big screen. I would love to see that get made, ’cause I think it’s very twisted, one of the most unique novels I’ve ever read, certainly. 

And I could go on and on. I just revisited ‘Fool for Love,’ a Sam Shepard play that I think is amazing—See, this is a mistake. This is why you don’t ask Isabel May to tell you what books should be adapted or not, because there are too many of them. People are talking about Sarah J. Maas right now, and Throne of Glass and all that. I read that over ten years ago, babies. I already know. I’m, like, very familiar with it. 

V: Who is Isabel May? What does she do on the typical day off and weekend?

IM: When people ask: ‘How do you ground yourself?’ I go, ‘No, no, no, no, no. You don’t understand. I’m ungrounding myself constantly.’ Any attempt at ungrounding, I seek. I’ve tried to keep up with my horseback riding. I’m trying to get my pilot’s license right now. I rarely drive. I try to do anything that feels dangerous or unacceptable. I read every book I can get my hands on. I think of it, and, and could this be developed into something? I write as much as I possibly can and consume movies ad nauseam because I think that my purpose in life is storytelling in any capacity. But I’m definitely like the girl you’re gonna find wearing her headphones in a museum, um, not wanting to be spoken to, just wanting to look around a little bit.

I hang out with my dog and throw the ball for her. That’s my primary job outside of acting—She’s really smart and she’s been my best friend, my confidant, my shoulder to cry on for almost six years—Anyone that’s not a dog person, don’t talk to me, I don’t understand you. By the way, you don’t have to be a dog person, but you can’t dislike them. If you dislike them, I’ll not trust you. You have to be a serial killer.

Credits

Portrait by Eric Day Davidson