How ‘Him’ star Tyriq Withers battled Ghostface, the Fisherman, and Marlon Wayans

Before Tyriq Withers faced the hook-slashing serial killer of this summer’s I Know What You Did Last Summer and an unhinged Marlon Wayans in this month’s Him, the 27-year-old Florida State grad first tangoed with Ghostface.

Withers moved to Atlanta when he was just starting as an actor. He remembers scouring Backstage and various apps with similar casting calls until he found one on a Facebook page for a Scream fan film. A Knife in the Dark: Chapter 2, directed by Tyler Horner and written by Horner and David Clark, still exists online as a 35-minute short, in which Withers plays a jock-type who’s attacked by Ghostface with his group of friends at a cabin in the woods.

“It is my Roman Empire,” Withers jokes during an interview with Entertainment Weekly. “That was one of my first projects. Lovely people involved. I’m still friends with some people on it. We’ve come a long way.”

Boy, has he. This year is the biggest of his career so far. Weeks after movie-goers watched him share the screen with heavy-hitters of horror like Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr. in the lega-sequel to the ’90s slasher, they will now watch him headline Him, in which he plays a rising superstar of college football opposite Wayans. (Horrors ensue!)

He somehow didn’t audition for the official Scream movies when they came back around, continuing with the seventh entry next year. “Unfortunately, I wasn’t on their radar,” he comments, “but that would’ve been a dream.”

Withers acknowledges that the attention he’s receiving from two nearly back-to-back studio films is a lot to handle. “I don’t think there’s enough talk about mental health in this industry,” he says. “I think just remaining grounded in it all and surrounding myself with beautiful souls to help me get through this time…I’m blessed to be here, but there come its trials and tribulations when you give your art into the world, and just making sure your mind is on the right track.”

It’s a funny topic of conversation to be having around Him, because all the horror of that movie stems from the fact that his character’s mind isn’t on the right track.

On the eve of pro football’s annual scouting combine, Withers’ wunderkind college star Cameron Cade suffers severe head trauma when he’s attacked by a deranged fan dressed in a horned mascot costume. When his professional future seems lost, he receives an invitation to train with Isaiah White (Wayans), Cam’s childhood idol, at the athlete’s private compound in the desert. It’s an opportunity too enticing to pass up, but he soon witnesses haunting visions as Isaiah’s mental state begins to unravel.

Thanks to Cam’s brain trauma, it’s difficult for him (and the audience) to distinguish what’s real from what’s in his head.

Withers became Him thanks to his episode of FX’s Atlanta, the black-and-white “Rich Wigga Poor Wigga” (2022), in which he played a mixed-race high school senior trying to prove his Black-ness in order to receive a scholarship. Casting director Carmen Cuba heard about Withers from Donald Glover himself and sent an inquiry to his team while the young actor was working on a movie in Serbia, another thriller called Family Secrets, directed by Malik Vitthal.

“I’m shooting like 13-, 14-hour days, and I’m having a conversation over Zoom after my shoot day at like 2 in the morning,” Withers recalls. “Carmen, she’s a good friend now, we’re just talking about life, identity, grief, loss, and by the end of the two-hour conversation, we’re both crying. And I didn’t know what it was for.”

Then came a Zoom meeting with Monkeypaw, including Peele and Tipping, and the project revealed itself. They just wanted to see him throw a football. “Do you know how hard it is to find a football in the middle of Serbia?” Withers asks. “It took like a week!” Vitthal then shot some footage of his star working out and handling a ball. The Him filmmakers complimented the director’s work after the fact because he shot the material like a movie.

“It kind of brought me back to my football days,” Withers adds, referring to his time playing wide receiver in college, “but also kind of scary because I’m like, ‘I kind of don’t look right throwing a football.'”

By the time he got the part, Universal and Monkeypaw sent him to absorb what he could from the professional football crowd. He trained with former quarterback Jordan Palmer, who’s currently the director of quarterback development for the XFL, while surrounded by some of the top quarterbacks in the nation. Withers calls it a humbling experience. “I just stripped my ego and decided I know nothing,” he says. “I just became a student of the game.”

More than a sports movie, Withers connected to something profound: the idea of loss. Yes, the entertainment factor comes from watching Wayans as Isaiah play demented mind games with Withers as Cam, but the character only seeks out Isaiah’s validation because he was his late father’s favorite player. “This movie is a love letter to their lost ones,” the actor says of Tipping and Wayans, “as it is mine.”

Withers mentions he endured “a rough childhood,” referring to unspecified “traumatic things.” He politely states, “I don’t wanna get too in-depth with that.” In more recent years, he brings up the loss of his brother, Kionte Withers, who died in a car accident in April 2021 at the age of 26. It’s something he talked about with Tipping, who shared his experience grieving the loss of his dad.

It’s also what made a particular scene — a press conference-type sequence referred to as “The Last Supper” for the overt visual parallels to the Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece — feel the most challenging. “He’s talking about his father, who passed away. I think that was a moment of truth with my own grief in my life that I had to really take in and present,” he says. “It was like a scene within a scene, sitting at a desk being interviewed. That level of vulnerability is not often seen.”

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When filming this sequence, Tipping gave Withers one direction: “Just empty the clip.” In other words, let it all out on the first take. What was supposed to be a close-up shot that pulls out wide ended up focusing more directly on the star’s face. “I just went to a different place where nothing was in the room, just a river of emotion and speaking from a real place,” he recalls of that day. “I was proud of that because it wasn’t acting at that point. It’s coming from a real place. I was most anxious for that, but I learned that sometimes you just have to let go, and that’s the best performance.”

For him, way more than getting stabbed by Ghostface or the Fisherman, “Vulnerability is often the scariest act,” Withers continues. “You’re not taught to show emotion. You’re taught to take it out on the field.”

“That was a scary film to make,” he says of Him, “because you’re living in that vulnerability for a long time.”

Him opens in theaters this weekend.