California Schemin’: James McAvoy’s Directorial Debut Movie Finds Its Leading Stars

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California Schemin’: James McAvoy’s Directorial Debut Movie Finds Its Leading Stars

With Mia Goth set to return as Maxine Minx in the upcoming third installment of Ti West’s slasher trilogy, the director explains why MaXXXine is “substantially bigger” than the earlier outings.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, West explained that both X and Pearl are movies about the movie industry itself. According to him, X “was a lot about the absurdity of making a movie,” while Pearl is “a movie about someone aspiring to have the life that the movies seem to [show].”

Meanwhile, MaXXXine — which will see the return of Goth as the aspiring actress last seen in X — will be a “very aggressive” world for the character.

“If you’re expecting it to be part of this X movie and people will be killed, yeah, I’m going to deliver on all those things. But it’s going to zig instead of zag in a lot of places that people aren’t expecting. It’s a very decadent world that she lives in, and it’s a very aggressive world that she lives in, but the threat shows up in an unexpected way,” West told EW.

He continued, “The thing that the other two movies don’t have is that sort of scope. To try to do a big, sprawling Los Angeles ensemble movie is what the movie was, and that’s just a big undertaking.”

What is MaXXXine about?

It was previously announced that the follow-up to West’s acclaimed X and Pearl will be rated R due to its “strong violence, gore, sexual content, graphic nudity, language, and drug use.” Maxine last appeared in 2022’s X as the sole survivor of the blood-filled murder spree in the summer of 1979. In the same year, Goth starred as Pearl, following the earlier days of the titular serial killer.

MaXXXine, which takes place in 1985, six years after the gory events of the first movie, features the return of the aspiring actress attempting to make a name for herself in Hollywood.

“In 1980s Hollywood, adult film star and aspiring actress Maxine Minx finally gets her big break. But as a mysterious killer stalks the starlets of Hollywood, a trail of blood threatens to reveal her sinister past,” the official synopsis for MaXXXine reads.

Apart from Goth, MaXXXine also stars Halsey, Kevin Bacon, Michelle Monaghan, Lily Collins, Elizabeth Debicki, Moses Sumney, Giancarlo Esposito, and Bobby Cannavale.

MaXXXine is set to hit theaters on July 5, 2024.