Actress Isabelle Fuhrman was 12 years old when she played Esther in the 2009 film Orphan. Her character was a 33-year-old woman secretly disguised as a 9-year-old. Now it seems things have come full circle, as Isabelle Fuhrman has reprised her role at 24 years of age for an upcoming prequel titled Orphan: First Kill. It’s definitely a surprising direction, considering the difficult task of making Isabelle Fuhrman appear as a child again. Now she’s opened up about the process and how much she enjoyed returning to the role.
As revealed in an interview with Slash Film, she actually had two body doubles in the film. Of course, they were only a fraction of the techniques used to make Isabelle Fuhrman look like a child for the new film. The film crew also used prosthetics, makeup, camera angles, and even slight CGI to de-age the actress.
Here’s what she had to say about the experience:
“For me, what was really lucky is that in order for us to make the movie, we had to hire two young ladies, Kennedy and Sadie Lee, who were me from other angles. And I just got to hang out with them all the time. And I felt really childlike working on the movie, and I felt like it was a great excuse for me to revisit some parts of my childlike self, because instead of finding moments to seem more adult, I had to find more moments to seem more childlike. It was a different challenge.”
She further added the following:
“It was really finding ways to explain to the kids that I was working alongside how we were going to do certain things and how we were going to be the same person. And really learning from them every single day and allowing them to play and dance and do things that I didn’t know how to do as Esther and finding ways to make it make sense within the story. And William Brent Bell, who directed the film, gave me complete free rein to work with them on my performance. And I’m so grateful to that because it allowed the three of us to create something special. And I think people will be really interested to see this Esther that is the Esther before the Esther you’ve seen in the previous film.”
It definitely sounds like a lot of effort was put into making Isabelle Fuhrman look and act so young again. It’s quite an unusual take for a prequel like this, especially so many years after the first film. At least we won’t have long to see how the final product turned out.
The release date for the highly anticipated horror film prequel Orphan: First Kill is January 28, 2022.