Our new favorite character in the Halloween franchise is a little boy named Julian.
There’s a whole lot to love about David Gordon Green’s Halloween, and certainly tons to talk about. The reboot/sequel is without question one of the franchise’s very best, highlighted by the truly terrifying return of Michael Myers and a brilliant performance from Jamie Lee Curtis. And yet, the shining star of the whole damn thing may be Jibrail Nantambu, a child actor whose name you probably never heard prior to entering your local theater this past weekend. Surely, once you got home, you ran a quick search and made sure you never forget it.
When I was on the set of Halloween early this year, one of the scenes being shot was babysitter Vicky’s death, wherein Michael Myers emerges from a bedroom closet and goes on the attack. After we watched a portion of that scene being filmed, co-producer Ryan Turek took a moment to hype up the performance from “the kid playing Julian,” who he said was such a natural on-screen that if he had his way, he’d cast him in absolutely every Blumhouse movie going forward. It wasn’t until earlier this month that I realized what he meant.
Jibrail Nantambu recounts his #HalloweenMovie scene https://t.co/9yWTd4ndrp pic.twitter.com/OIxDduCVcI
— Variety (@Variety) October 18, 2018
At the east coast premiere of Halloween, hosted by the Salem Horror Fest on October 4th, the crowd went BANANAS every time that kid, Jibrail Nantambu, was on screen. Nantambu plays Julian in Halloween, a wisecracking little boy that Virginia Gardner’s Vicky is in charge of babysitting on the night of her murder. Every word that comes out of Nantambu’s foul mouth in his brief appearance in the film is pure gold – the “nasty ass toenails” line, in particular, had me rolling – and as it turns out, most of that was ad-libbed by the scene-stealing young actor!
“Most of what [Jibrail] says is improvised. That was his first movie,” David Gordon Green explained to Polygon in a recent chat. “He had great energy and so we just kind of let him loose. In the audition, when we were auditioning kids, there was a closet door in the room, and I was like, ‘Now I want you to open the closet door,’ because it’s just interesting to see what kids would do. And he was like, ‘No, I’m done.’ He wasn’t going to let some annoying, nerdy director tell him to go into a closet.”
(It’s worth noting that Halloween was indeed Jibrail Nantambu’s big screen debut, but he did also appear in an episode from this year’s season of “Preacher,” titled ‘Angelville’!)
So what’s the fate of one of the most lovable kids in horror history? The good news is that Julian totally bails when he realizes Michael Myers isn’t to be messed with – in that regard, he’s not just one of the funniest but also one of the smartest characters in all the Halloween films – so Julian is one of the few characters in this year’s film who survives Michael’s wrath. At one point, he gets the hell out of dodge and is never seen or heard from again, and we can only hope that the inevitable sequel will bring Nantambu back for more foul-mouthed fun.
Nantambu’s well-beyond-his-years improv skills are the *perfect* comedic relief for Halloween, and we’re hoping to see so much more of that little dude on screen in the future.
Hey Netflix. If you’re looking to bring a new kid into Hawkins…
