On the last day of filming his final Conjuring movie, Patrick Wilson didn't have some momentous cathartic moment. There was no, "Oh my God, it's all
On the last day of filming his final Conjuring movie, Patrick Wilson didn’t have some momentous cathartic moment. There was no, “Oh my God, it’s all over,” he says of wrapping this fall’s The Conjuring: Last Rites and, with it, his 12-year stint as demonologist Ed Warren. Wilson just doesn’t look at life in those terms.
“There’s only so many times you can say, ‘This is the worst case we’ve ever had!'” the actor, 51, tells Entertainment Weekly in jest.
Vera Farmiga, who went to hell and back with him as Ed’s clairvoyant wife, Lorraine Warren, feels the same.
“My rosary literally busted apart,” Farmiga, also 51, remarks. “The beads were like, ‘Girl, we’re out of here!’ I think we’ve done as much as we can do for this.”
It’s only when they think of each other that the quips subside and the tears start to flow.
Wilson sits in his hotel room in Georgia, where he’s filming his next project, Apple TV’s Cape Fear series adaptation, while Farmiga is halfway around the world in Budapest shooting Cold War thriller Billion Dollar Spy. (As soon as she leaves her video call with EW, the actress — who’s also enjoying the release of Midnight Minuet, the debut album of her rock band the Yagas — plans to pore over a script covered in streaks of green highlighter.
“We start filming tomorrow, and they literally changed all the scenes on me,” she exclaims, waving the pages at the Zoom screen.)
Both stars have effectively moved on from the Conjuring Universe, which took up residence in their lives starting with the franchise’s first movie, released in 2013. Yet, they remain tethered to each other, and merely mentioning the other’s name seems to replenish their spirits.
“That’s just the absolutely best arranged marriage in the history of arranged marriages,” Farmiga says through laughs. She speaks slowly and pauses mid-response, her eyes glistening as if some core memory plays in her head. Wilson is Farmiga’s Scarecrow.
“I’m going to miss Patrick most of all,” she says. “I mean, not really. He’s reachable within seconds on text. But I’ll miss him as a fun scene partner who totally understands my kind of neurology, who vibes with my brain in a way. I love that guy. I’m so blessed to have had him by my side. He made all of these life-zapping, exhausting exorcisms feel like a family barbecue.”
Wilson stares off to the side of his own Zoom screen in a separate conversation, his chin resting in his palm in a comparable moment of still reflection.
“I think that’s why when you say, ‘Can you imagine it being over?’ I actually can’t imagine it really because of her,” he says. “It really meant the world to me. I didn’t think we’d be doing this for 12, 13 years. I only know this because I have a shirt from running a race in Wilmington. It says 2012, [which is] when we shot the first one. So, yeah, I get emotional. I can’t imagine not doing a movie with her.”
The personal bond these two forged through demonic hellfire and brimstone is what the makers of the eight-film franchise (nine if you include 2019’s The Curse of La Llorona) leaned on for The Conjuring: Last Rites (out Sept. 5), the fourth installment of the main Conjuring movies and the conclusion to the Warrens’ saga on the massive screen.
“Even as we were developing it, we were throwing a bunch of ideas out: ‘How shamelessly big can we make it?’ ‘How epic can we make it?’ ‘Is this the culmination of all the demons coming to face them?” says director Michael Chaves, who previously helmed La Llorona, The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021), and The Nun II (2023).
He admits the team briefly entertained the idea of about a dozen Doctor Strange portals opening to reveal every Conjuring entity assembled together for an endgame of sorts. But they quickly came to a different conclusion: “I felt strongly that the biggest, most emotional story we could tell was the most personal story.”
“The beating heart of this franchise is Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson playing Ed and Lorraine,” says James Wan, who directed the first two films before leading the charge as an executive producer of the franchise with Peter Safran. “The family dynamic, the faith the characters have, and the faith that they have in each other are really the things that drive this particular franchise. I do think that’s what people love about it. At least for me and Peter Safran, it’s really about finding a way to tell the stories of these characters and to wrap them up in a way that feels respectful to where we started with them.”
“One of the more Googleable” cases
Despite a mid-credits scene attached to The Nun II that features Wilson and Farmiga, The Conjuring: Last Rites is not a direct continuation of that movie, which was largely set in 1960 and involved the possession of priest Maurice (Jonas Bloquet). Chaves repurposed a sequence he cut from The Devil Made Me Do It for that ending tag, showing Ed and Lorraine answering a phone call from Father Gordon (Steve Coulter) for their next assignment.
Chaves told EW around the time of The Nun II’s release that it was meant to be “a little bit of a tease” for the final Conjuring movie. Speculation ensued as to whether this meant Maurice’s case would be front and center for the Warrens’ last act, or if Taissa Farmiga, who stars as Sister Irene in the Nun movies, would finally appear on screen beside her real-life sister, Vera, as Lorraine. Taissa is not in Last Rites, Chaves confirms, even if there were times when the filmmaker admittedly craved that kind of Avengers-level Farmiga family team-up. Instead, the story is more connected to the main Conjuring films.
“The third film was kind of a detour,” Wilson notes of The Devil Made Me Do It, which marked the first time a Conjuring movie introduced a human as the main antagonist. “It was more a murder mystery, really like a true crime. This really felt like a proper ending to get back to the heart of the franchise, the family of it all.”
Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson in ‘The Conjuring: Last Rites’.
Giles Keyte/Warner Bros.
Last Rites takes place in 1986, five years after the events of The Devil Made Me Do It. The Warrens retired from the exorcist business, largely due to Ed’s heart attack, the one sustained during the demonic happenings of the third film. They still hit the university circuit, presenting talks at various schools, but even those opportunities are drying up.
“Ed got pretty beat up in the third one, so I honestly didn’t want to be on death’s door for this movie,” Wilson says. “First of all, there’s no reason to be — he lived another 25 years.” (The real Ed Warren died in 2006 at the age of 79.) “But retirement was interesting to me,” the actor continues. “It was important to show the skeptics. We’re not in the middle of Amityville, when [hauntings were] everywhere. What is it like when they’re not playing to big crowds? What does that do to them?”
Of course, certain events force them back into the fold one last time.
The case at the center of Last Rites is one of the more eminent events from the Warrens’ career: the Smurl family haunting. According to the New England Society of Psychic Research — the occult-investigating organization now run by Ed and Lorraine’s real-life daughter and son-in-law, Judy and Tony Spera (both of whom cameo in the film) — Janet and Jack Smurl moved their family into a duplex on Chase Street in West Pittston, Pa., in the 1970s. In the years that followed, the Smurls, including their newborn daughters and Jack’s parents, claimed to experience supernatural occurrences ranging from strange odors and voices all the way to ghostly molestations.
The Smurls’ appearances on TV programs such as Larry King Live and Entertainment Tonight made it one of the more publicized cases of supernatural activity, but it also gave skeptics ammunition to say they sold out for the public spotlight. The story became the subject of the book The Haunted: One Family’s Nightmare (1986) and a 1991 made-for-TV movie starring Sally Kirkland.
Rebecca Calder (Wrath of Man) and Elliot Cowan (Foundation) will now appear as Janet and Jack Smurl in Last Rites, with the rest of the family portrayed by Kíla Lord Cassidy (Heather), Beau Gadsdon (Dawn), Tilly Walker (Carin), Molly Cartwright (Shannon), Peter Wight (Grandpa Smurl), and Kate Fahy (Grandma Smurl).
Orion Smith as newborn Ed, Madison Lawlor as newborn Lorraine in ‘The Conjuring: Last Rites’.
Giles Keyte/Warner Bros.
Safran notes how the Smurl case “percolated on a regular basis” as the filmmakers plotted the earlier films.
“It is one of the more Googleable ones,” he says. “It really fit the bill for us, being able to lean into something that audiences could go and Google after the movie. ‘Oh! They really did have that many children.’ ‘Oh! They really were this age, and the grandparents really were there.’ All of that stuff has always been meaningful to us.”
“We’ve known about this one for a long time,” says Wilson, who watched many clips of those various TV appearances when he first started preparing to play Ed in The Conjuring 1. “Then writers are playing around with how it affects the family and what’s going on in the family’s life. That’s where we can really theatricalize it. We’re not making a documentary.”
Judy Warren plays a massive part in that. For Chaves, Ed and Lorraine’s now fully grown daughter offers the real meat of the movie — and gives this cinematic conclusion its emotional core.
“They’re going to witness a moment in the Warrens’ lives — and a pretty profound moment,” Farmiga says of the audience. “It’s a moment that makes time stand still. This one’s different than the others. The other three were about hauntings, and this one is about reckoning, in a way.”
Like mother, like daughter
Mia Tomlinson as Judy Warren in ‘The Conjuring: Last Rites’.
Giles Keyte/Warner Bros.
Fans of The Conjuring have watched Judy grow up on screen over more than a decade, first through Sterling Jerins as a little girl in the flagship film and its two direct sequels. Mckenna Grace also prominently played Judy in a sequel to one of the spinoffs, Annabelle Comes Home (2019). Now, audiences will meet Judy as an adult in her 20s by way of Mia Tomlinson, a British actress best known to American audiences from Netflix’s dramatized docuseries The Lost Pirate Kingdom.
“It’s a slightly different take on the Judy that we’ve seen before,” Chaves prefaces. “I think it’s a more interesting and a more real take [on] what it’s like to grow up the daughter of the Warrens. What is it like when you are living with an artifact room that is filled with demonic items? How hard is that? What impact does that leave on a person’s life?”
Tomlinson heard about the audition through her agent, a self-proclaimed diehard Conjuring fan who urged her to go after the part. She immediately impressed Chaves in the casting phase with a instinctive act.
“I did a chemistry read with a couple of actors. I’m quite cheeky, and I ended up scaring one of them in it,” recalls the longtime lover of horror, who got her kicks as a kid spooking her younger siblings. “There was a tense moment where he was pausing and I gave a big ‘Boo!’ in his face.”
Tomlinson took bits and pieces from Jerins’ and Grace’s performances to create this adult Judy, who introduces her parents to her boyfriend, Tony (Ben Hardy of Bohemian Rhapsody and X-Men: Apocalypse), for the first time when the Smurl horrors rear. The other pieces came from Judy herself. Tomlinson anticipated her real-world inspiration would be closed off to life-probing questions from the actress playing her, especially with such a sensitive family story lingering in her background, but she was surprised by Judy’s openness.
“One thing that was quite remarkable about Judy was her relationship with Tony,” Tomlinson comments. “They have such a loving relationship, the two of them, and I really enjoyed speaking to her about what love is to her, what family is to her, what partnership is — because, fundamentally, that’s at the core of who she is.”
Patrick Wilson and Ben Hardy on set of ‘The Conjuring: Last Rites’ with director Michael Chaves.
Giles Keyte/Warner Bros.
Hardy, also known for films 6 Underground and Pixie, teases “some fun dynamics” that occur when Tony is introduced to the Warrens’ matriarch and patriarch.
“Chaves would say that he’s the audience’s lens,” says the actor. “It’s a new world to him, learning constantly on the fly. Anything demonic is happening for the first time for him, as well as any new audience members.”
Chaves sees Wilson’s Ed as serving a Father of the Bride role when it comes to Judy and Tony, which Wilson agrees is an right portrait of that animated: “I don’t have girls, so it was my only time to act like that,” he says as a dad to two boys.
“It’s sort of like a paranormal Meet the Parents,” Hardy continues. “I speak in jest, but there is an element of, Are you good enough for my daughter? He’s not an asshole, but he’s just protective. I come in perhaps quite cocksure and trying to please, but I think he sees me as naive, potentially.”
Safran credits the introduction of adult Judy and Tony to David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick, a writer on The Conjuring 2, The Devil Made Me Do It, and now Last Rites. In some ways, it goes back to The Nun and the connection between Taissa’s Sister Irene and Vera’s Lorraine.
“It’s not directly clear in The Nun, but there is this implication they come from a line of saints,” Chaves notes, “so that idea could be continued.”
“Lorraine’s got this full-bar wifi of clairvoyance, and there’s a bar or two that start popping up for Judy,” Farmiga remarks. “She’s obviously inherited this spiritual sensitivity and, of course, it deepens Lorraine’s concerns, not just as a mother, but as someone who really understands the burden of those sensibilities…. Judy has been the quiet force right behind everything that Lorraine does. She’s the light. She’s the reason that Lorraine still fights when she feels like there’s nothing left to give.”
Madison Lawlor as newborn Lorraine and Orion Smith as newborn Ed in ‘The Conjuring: Last Rites’.
Giles Keyte/Warner Bros.
Whatever the malevolent entity (or entities) is after this time around, it feels far more personal. Exclusive first-look images reveal flashbacks to newborn Ed and Lorraine, played by Orion Smith and Madison Lawlor, who will factor into the story, while EW’s Last Rites cover itself offers further clues: Visions of a more ghostly Ed and Lorraine flash on screen, grinning maniacally toward camera as if they’re some twisted doppelgangers. There’s not much the team can say about that particular element, but Wilson feels it’s a poetic choice made for this final chapter.
“Whether it’s dealing with mortality or dealing with where they are at the end of their career, you’re forced to look in the mirror,” he comments. “Who’s on the other side may not be the most pleasant. Those are themes we definitely explore.”
Chaves is just as cryptic. “Ultimately, this is a story about a family,” he explains. “At its core, it’s about parents and a child. It’s about the experience of being a parent, and our children often mirror ourselves. They are reflections of who we are. That might be an element of the film.”
A history of hauntings
Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) and Judy (Mia Tomlinson) in ‘The Conjuring: Last Rites’.
Giles Keyte/Warner Bros.
Tomlinson was a teenager who frequented U.K. theaters in search of modern horror by the time the first Conjuring movie opened, which adds more meaning to her in playing Judy for this bookend installment.
“It’s been a real 360 moment, where I grew up with these films coming out intermittently and knowing how frightening they were,” she remembers.
Hardy, not so much. “Back then, I wasn’t really into horror movies,” he confesses, “but I’d heard about The Conjuring. I wasn’t one who had my ear to the ground for horror, but it was impossible to avoid.”
He remembers that first teaser released for the first film: an extended sequence where Lili Taylor’s Patti Perron plays a game of Hide and Clap with what she thinks is one of her kids until ghostly child hands pop out from the shadows behind her.
“People went crazy for it,” Safran recalls, but not even Lorraine herself could divine what The Conjuring would become. The film tested well, according to the producer, but it opened in theaters on a July 19th weekend already populated by the Ryan Reynolds- and Jeff Bridges-led R.I.P.D., the animated Turbo, and the sequel to Bruce Willis vehicle Red. It’s basic in hindsight to predict which title would win the weekend — but at the time, The Conjuring wasn’t a recognizable name.
“It definitely was a bit nerve-wracking,” Wan admits, “but at the end of the day, I felt like I made a really good movie that I was proud of. I felt deep down that people would discover it along the way.”
“And by the way,” Safran adds, “we were opening up in the summer, which was an unusual time for a horror movie.” (Not so much anymore.) “Then over that Thursday night, I just kept refreshing ‘Conjuring’ on Twitter. Suddenly, between 8 p.m. and midnight, the volume of tweets, ‘Just saw the scariest movie of all time’… I’d wait three minutes and then it’d be like 300 new mentions.”
The film didn’t just make bigger stars out of Wilson and Farmiga, but also the characters themselves. Annabelle became an instant horror icon as a result of The Conjuring’s success, and the creators quickly capitalized on that hype by giving the creepy doll its own movie a year later.
The Annabelle doll in her self-titled 2014 horror spinoff.
Gregory Smith/Warner Bros.
“It was a total experiment: A $5 million movie that did $265 million at the box office is incredible,” Safran says. “[Annabelle] was not particularly well regarded as a film, but audiences were there for it.”
From here, the franchise can be tracked, oddly enough, through the spinoffs that didn’t happen. After Annabelle, Wan returned to direct The Conjuring 2, which introduced the Crooked Man, among other entities. This Slender Man-esque spirit bears its acute teeth as it spooks the newborn Billy (Benjamin Haigh).
“We thought the Crooked Man was basically going to be the Annabelle for Conjuring 2,” Safran says. However, test screenings proved people were latching onto the nun, a.k.a. Valak, the demon that manifests as this Satanic holy woman who originated as a potentially throwaway character.
Valak in ‘The Nun’.
Warner Bros. Pictures
“There was a demon presence and it just wasn’t satisfying us or the audience,” Safran recalls. “So in a one-day reshoot against blue screen, James shot Bonnie Aarons doing a whole bunch of different things that we then inserted into the movie. When the audiences saw the movie, they wanted to know more about the nun. That’s what they gravitated toward.”
While The Nun became a mini offshoot in itself, the Crooked Man fell back into the ether… though Wan holds on to the dream of one day giving the entity his due.
“I still have a movie in my head that I would hopefully love to get off the ground one day, but we’ll see,” he says. “I get fans that reach out to me every now and then, begging us to make a Crooked Man movie. Just as a fan, I would love to do it one day, if I can convince the studio to do so.”
Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga in ‘The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It’.
Warner Bros. / Courtesy Everett Collection
Another entity that went the way of the Crooked Man was “the Beast.” Chaves and Wan came up with this The Devil Made Me Do It demon, which also initially felt like spinoff potential. Atlanta-based Davis Osborn performed as the creature, who appears in a waterbed to torment the newborn David Glatzel (Julian Hilliard) — though deleted material shows a scene in which the Beast appears before an incarcerated Arne Johnson (Ruairi O’Connor).
“It was just one of those things, kind of like the Crooked Man, where it was not working,” Chaves remarks.
“Listen, audiences don’t care about your feelings,” Safran points out. “They will just tell you what they like or what they don’t like.”
Fortunately, their likes ended up far outweighing their dislikes over the years. Farmiga often finds herself scrolling through her Instagram feed to see the variety of responses: letters, poems, fan art, and even fan fiction inspired by The Conjuring and these characters they helped create.
“It’s not just being a part of this film, it’s seeing what the franchise has meant to people,” she says. “There was this gal who asked this fan-fiction writer to explore the babysitter story in Annabelle. It’s wild. People aren’t just watching the films, they’re building all these entire worlds around them, and connecting through them. They’re the ones that have kept the spirit of this franchise alive.”
Conjuring a continuation?
Vera Farmiga on the set of ‘The Conjuring: Last Rites’.
Giles Keyte/Warner Bros.
Now that The Conjuring is reading its last rites, Wilson and Farmiga are recalibrating their place in the grander scheme. Instead of dynamic participants in this franchise, they’ll now be viewers. HBO announced in 2023 that a drama series for Max based on the world of the movies was in development. Wan and Safran, who are producing this series through their respective production companies for Warner Bros. Television, confirm it’s still very much in the works, but there are no modern details to reveal publicly at this time.
“Me and Vera do take such pride in anything with the Conjuring title. I don’t know what it’s like to watch something that says ‘Conjuring’ and not be in it,” Wilson remarks of the planned show. “I don’t know. That’s a scary thought to me.”
Separately, Richard Brenner, the head of New Line, used intriguing phrasing during an interview with The Hollywood Reporter when describing Last Rites as “the last of what we call Phase One” of the Conjuring Universe. The natural implication is that there could be a Phase Two, though Brenner said at the time that’s all “TBD.”
In terms of what that might mean for Last Rites, “It’s the end of the story with Patrick and Vera as Ed and Lorraine,” Safran comments. “It doesn’t rule out opportunities to do things down the line, but without really knowing exactly what I could say, I feel like The Conjuring is still a great playground.”
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Any talks relating to a Phase Two are still “pretty early days,” he clarifies, so as far as the producers are concerned, this is it for the big-screen run.
“It really is putting a closure to the story, to the characters that we started with Conjuring 1,” Wan says. “Whatever phases that might be in the future, this is the one that we just want to be able to wrap up in the right way.”
Farmiga can’t even imagine making another Conjuring movie that could top what they pulled off with this one.
“It is the end of the road. It’s got to be the end of the road,” she says. “I would literally explode on camera. What Last Rites demanded of us physically, emotionally, mentally, stamina-wise…. It’s been a long haul, man. It’s been a really, really long haul, but it’s time. It is time to trade her clairvoyance in for crossword puzzles. She’s going to take up some tai chi. They’re going to Turks and Caicos, baby, and so am I.”
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