Scott Foley Didn’t Know He Was Ghostface in ‘Scream 3’

Scott Foley was in for quite the surprise when he discovered who the killer was in Scream 3.

“When I was cast, they didn’t tell me that I was the killer,” Foley, 51, told The A.V. Club on Monday, March 25. “They kept everything so hush-hush. Back in those days, I don’t even think there was email then. We’d get scripts with big, blacked-out pages so we couldn’t read or photocopy any of the pages because they wanted to keep everything so secret.”

Foley said it wasn’t until “maybe two weeks into shooting” that the director behind the first four Scream films, Wes Craven, broke the news to him about his character.

“Wes was sitting behind the camera at video village, and called me over. And I was a 20-something-year-old kid and I was so excited,” he recalled. “He said, ‘You know what’s going on here, right?’ And I said ‘Yeah, we’re shooting this scene.’ And he said, ‘You know what your character is?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I’m the director of the fake movie.’ And he said, ‘You’re the killer.’”

Foley remembered being shocked, saying, “Oh! What?” Craven, for his part, told him to keep it down.

“It was really great,” Foley said. “For some reason, Scream 3 was looked down on for a lot of years. But in the past, I don’t know, 10 years, there’s been a renaissance or a resurgence. I get more people coming up [to me] and asking for autographs or pictures because of that movie than maybe anything else. And I’m so proud of it and proud to be a part of that Scream franchise.”

The Scream franchise has been scaring audiences since the first film was released in 1996. The movie followed Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), who is terrorized by numerous killers hiding behind a Ghostface identity, and also starred Courteney Cox as Gale Weathers and David Arquette as Dewey Riley.

In 2000’s Scream 3, Foley starred as film director Roman Bridger, who ended up being Ghostface. During a 2021 SiriusXM interview, Foley called playing one of the franchise’s iconic Ghostfaces an “honor.”

“Scream 3 sort of is, I don’t know, the bastard stepchild of the Scream trilogy — or now, what are there, nine films?” Foley said at the time. “I think they did a good job, look, for a third film in a trilogy when there was only one planned. I think they did a really good job.”