'The Exorcist: Believer' filmmakers reveal how they lured Ellen Burstyn and Linda Blair back to franchise 50 years later (spoilers)

David Gordon Green remembers the precise moment he convinced Ellen Burstyn to return to The Exorcist.

The 90-year-old actress, who earned one of the seminal 1973 horror film’s 10 Oscar nominations for playing the distressed mother of a possessed teenage girl (Linda Blair), had been opposed to reprising her role as Chris MacNeil through four previous sequels/prequels and a short-lived TV series. (Given the intensity of her experience and injuries suffered on the set of William Friedkin’s provocative original, not to mention the so-called “Exorcist curse” that plagued the film, it’s understandable.)

“She was not game from the get-go,” producer Jason Blum tells us at a press day for the new sequel The Exorcist: Believer, which opened over the weekend with $27.2 million. “She has resisted it for 50 years, so she really wasn't [game], but we approached her very delicately and sensitively. And we had done a similar thing with Jamie Lee Curtis on Halloween [Green and Blum rebooted that classic horror series with a 2018-2022 trilogy], and John Carpenter also on Halloween, and we kind of walked her through that experience. And David is a particularly actor-friendly director, so ultimately she decided to do the movie after meeting with David, hearing his vision for the movie, how he felt he was going to make the movie, and that gave her the comfort to join our team.”

As for that moment?

“She's one of the most magnificent, charismatic actresses that I've ever been in a room with, and I didn't know if she would agree to this movie,” Green says. “I show up at her apartment and we were having tea and looking out over the park. And then when she said, ‘Would you like to go feed the baby pigeons with me?,’ I knew we were about to begin an amazing journey.”

Burstyn doesn’t just appear in Believer, she has a prominent role. After two teen girls (Lidya Jewett and Olivia Marcum) go missing in the woods and reappear three days later exhibiting some seriously demonic behavior, one of their dads (Leslie Odom Jr.’s Victor Fielding) tracks down MacNeil, who’s written a book about her experiences from the first film and advises Fielding.

The veteran actress also owns the film’s most shocking moment: when one of the possessed girls stabs her in both eyes with a crucifix, blinding her.

“Before I had her read the script, which I was terrified of doing, I pitched her the idea,” Green recalls. “And when I got to that point, she was quiet and she says, ‘You're not going to kill me, are you?’ [laughs] So then to stage that and rehearse that, and building a prosthetic that we could actually impale, it was a process. But it was a lot of fun when you have an actresses as curious and playful as Ellen.”

Burstyn isn’t the only major legacy character who makes a notable return in Believer. Though she has rarely acted much in recent decades, Blair also cameos in the film’s final scene, as Chris and Regan (and in turn, Burstyn and Blair) share a poignant mother-daughter reunion.

“I reached out to her when the movie was coming together because I think David and I share a belief, which is not particularly common in Hollywood, but David and I both agree that if you're going to attempt to remake or extend an iconic storytelling, the people who were involved in the original should be told,” Blum says.

“And so I reached out to say we were doing this and this was happening. We actually had a great, very long conversation and at the end of the conversation, we didn't discuss it directly, but it became clear to me that she might want to be involved. In fact, she started off the conversation actually saying, ‘I would never do this.’ And as we talked for an hour or two, it seemed like maybe she might want to. So then we talked about it and then we figured out a way to make that happen.”

Blair actually began on the film as a behind-the-scenes consultant before they plotted out her climactic cameo.

“We brought her on as an advisor, just from an ethical standpoint and a creative tool bag of how to work with young actresses,” Green says. “For me, it was just a very valuable resource to be able to have someone that was really a pioneer of that type of depth of performance that a young actress was going through. I mean, you can point to Miracle Worker and some films before that went to some difficult places, but The Exorcist was really monumental in that performance.

“I was very protective of our young talent [Jewett and Marcum] in front of the camera, and I wanted to take them very safely to these dark places. So we used her as an advisor and got to know her, became her friend, and it all evolved in a way that went beyond what I could have imagined.”

The Exorcist: Believer is now playing.