‘Thanksgiving’ Star Gabriel Davenport Weighs-in on Sequel, Says Eli Roth Is ‘One Giant High School Kid’ (Exclusive)

It was recently announced that Eli Roth’s hit holiday horror flick Thanksgiving will be getting a sequel, and horror fans everywhere couldn’t be more thrilled. The film spawned out of a faux trailer that Roth made years ago for Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse movie, and follows a group of high school students in Plymouth, Massachusetts as they’re stalked by a murderous pilgrim known as John Carver, named for a real-life founding settler in New England. Ahead of the big sequel news, PopCulture.com had a chance to chat with Gabriel Davenport — who stars as Scuba, one of the students hunted by Carver — and he shared his thoughts on a follow-up while also reflecting on what it was like to work with Roth as a director.

“He’s like one giant high school kid,” Davenport quipped. “He’s so fun to be around and to hang out with, and he just has fun on set. He doesn’t make it… Even though he’s a very serious guy when he needs to be, he doesn’t make everything so serious.” He added, “Which is crazy in this environment where everything needs to be like, but he’s there having fun, busting jokes, talking about stupid things, and we’re all just kind of vibing. So in the very beginning, first day we met him, it’s like we were a family. Just off the jump. He was just telling us all these stories, how he started this all stuff, talking about all these other people he used to work with and met. So it was super dope working with him.”

Davenport went on to say that he “100 percent” believed the film would get a sequel, and he was clearly on to something because it’s now official. “If they do a part two, you can now even dig deeper into the backstory of these characters, dig deeper into what they were going through at those moments,” the actor said. “You could dig deeper into other new characters that come in. There’s so much you could do, and so there definitely should be a part two.”

He continued, “This is an original horror film that has original cast. You don’t know none of them. There’s nothing, I guess appealing in the sense of, there’s Hunger Games, there’s Trolls, there’s Napoleon, there’s all the other shows that have big people in it, big stories already. They already have their stuff. This is an original that no one knows about and no one’s really heard about. Don’t you want to see something new? I feel like that’s what people want to see.”

Lastly, we asked Davenport about the creepy Carver mask and when he initially got to see it. “I saw it for the first time on set because when we did our screen test,” he shared, “I don’t think they showed us then I think it was something different. So I saw it for the first time I was sat. I was like, ‘Oh, this is weird.’ And then when they did the melting thing, I was like, oh, this is even creepier. So I was like whoa.”

He added that the mask was way more intense for his character “because these are all my friends, these are all my people I love now, and I’m seeing all the stuff that’s going down and I’m like, ‘Oh!’ So it does feel,” he then quipped, “I guess if your mom was to watch you on screen die, that’s kind of how it feels. It’s so close to home that it might traumatize you a little bit. So yeah, it definitely was intense. It was definitely way more intense while shooting it, but you could still feel bits and pieces of that, the memories and stuff like that.” Thanksgiving is now playing in theaters everywhere.