Strangely enough, that key hallway dance number wasn’t originally in the script for “M3GAN.” Johnstone “just kind of snuck” the scene in, and the film’s other creatives easily embraced it. Speaking to /Film, Johnstone explained that, “strangely, I think everyone was on board from the get-go.” Of course, movies go through a lot of shaping as they proceed through successive iterations of the script, improvisations and on set problem solving, and the post-production process, but the hallway dance number was never touched. Johnstone elaborates:
“You get a lot of notes about story things and, ‘Will this makes sense?’ and ‘How are we going to do this?’ But the dance, weirdly, stayed under the radar for a long time. I think everyone just thought it was a really fun, exciting, new idea.”
When the time came to shoot the now infamous sequence, “they were already having so much fun with her character that it just felt like the natural next place to take it.” And so, M3GAN went from TikTok dances with her young charge to becoming a robotic dancing fiend, with her inhuman movement patterns playing a major role in securing her place as an unsettling new horror icon.
“M3GAN” is in theaters now.