Grim Grinning Ghosts are back to socialize.
“Haunted Mansion” (in theaters Friday) puts a bittersweet spin on the iconic Disney attraction, exactly 20 years after Eddie Murphy’s critically reviled comedy. The new movie follows a mourning paranormal expert named Ben (LaKeith Stanfield), who’s summoned to a spooky New Orleans estate to help a widow (Rosario Dawson) drive out ghosts.
The all-star film includes Tiffany Haddish as kooky medium Harriet, as well as Oscar winner Jamie Lee Curtis, playing a clairvoyant disembodied head named Madame Leota (a centerpiece of the theme park ride). The movie is filled with jokes and callbacks that Disney superfans will appreciate, but also grapples with weightier themes of family and grief.
“I’ve been at that attraction since I was a little, little girl,” Curtis told USA TODAY in a joint interview with Haddish prior to the Screen Actors Guild strike. “We all have a tremendous emotional response to that attraction. It evokes a lot of memories.”
Curtis, 64, and Haddish, 43, tell us more about “Haunted Mansion,” Groupon tours and supernatural experiences.
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Eleanor Audley voiced Madame Leota in the original Haunted Mansion ride, which opened at Disneyland in 1969. (Fun fact: She also played Maleficent in Disney’s animated “Sleeping Beauty” and the wicked stepmother in “Cinderella.”) Years earlier, Audley made a brief appearance in the 1963 romantic comedy “Wives and Lovers,” starring Curtis’ late mother, Janet Leigh.
“You know what? I did not realize that. That’s interesting,” Curtis says. “That’s a lovely, weird, little connect-the-dot. And that’s the beautiful part of this (film): the connection to our memories of our past. It’s a movie about loss and letting go of spirits and reconnecting with them. So the fact that there’s a connect-the-dot back to my mother and the woman in the original crystal ball, it just tells you that we’re right where we’re supposed to be: connected back to the past in a modern way.”
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Tiffany Haddish spent $3,000 learning to play a psychic
Haddish took her prep work for Harriet very seriously. She visited a medium to learn how they communicate with spirits, as well as a Reiki practitioner, who taught her about energy healing.
“I spent about $3,000 in research for this project,” Haddish says. “I let them do a reading, and then I asked a lot of questions about how they do what they do. I don’t know if I learned much, but it’s a tax write-off because it’s research for work!”
“Wow. I did absolutely nothing,” Curtis quips. Although, “there was a perfume I wore that had a musk. I’m an olfactory person, so the characters that I play have very specific perfumes. It’s the perfume that my friend Melanie Griffith’s daughter, Stella, (makes). She produces a perfume that I thought was perfect for Madame Leota.”
Jamie Lee Curtis was fastened in place for Madame Leota scenes
Although Leota is famously trapped in a crystal ball, “Haunted Mansion” flashes back in time to explain how she got there. Curtis relished the character’s “exquisite” gown, which she accessorized with an ornate headdress and cape.
“In my almost 47 years of being a professional actor, I’ve never worn costumes that beautiful,” Curtis says of the dress, designed by Jeffrey Kurland. “When it wins the Oscar, it’ll end up in the Academy Museum’s permanent collection. It’s so gorgeous.”
Slightly less glamorous was the computer-generated crystal ball. To shoot those scenes, “they put 100 dots on your face, they put your head in a vise, and all the other actors around you are laughing and having a great time, and you can’t move,” Curtis recalls. Leota’s hair, too, was created using visual effects: “As you can tell, Mommy doesn’t have giant hair.”
Haddish took her castmates on an ‘intoxicated’ Groupon ghost tour
Haddish is no stranger to New Orleans. The actress shot 2018’s “Girls Trip” in the Big Easy, and went viral with her story of taking Will and Jada Pinkett Smith on a Groupon swamp tour. Returning to the city to shoot “Haunted Mansion,” she treated her new co-stars to a Groupon ghost tour.
“You know me,” Haddish says with a laugh. “It was fun! We stopped at bars and had drinks, and then the person told us stories about every building. I know a lot of the stories are probably lies, but it doesn’t matter. It was entertaining because we were intoxicated. You spend $100 on a Groupon, but then you spend another $100 on everybody’s drinks. So it’s actually not really a deal when you think about it.”
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The ‘Girls Trip’ star got a shocking visit from her late grandma
In one of the film’s most touching scenes, Harriet comforts Ben by telling him about the idea of “ghost winks”: little signs from your deceased loved ones that they’re still looking after you. Haddish has had her own experiences with the phenomena.
“My grandmother passed away last year while we were shooting this movie, and one of my friends told me, ‘Whenever you see a white feather, that’s your grandmother visiting you,’ ” Haddish says. “The next day, I come out of my bedroom and there are feathers all over my living room, a bird laid out dead and my cat sitting on the chair. I was like, ‘Grandma, why would you do this?!’ It kind of messed me up and I did not like it.
“I was like, ‘If this is Grandma, don’t come to me like that! Don’t disrespect my house – now I’ve got to clean all this up! If it was the reverse, you would be mad at me, so don’t do that no more!’ And now my grandma shows up in my dreams almost every single night.”
