Interview With David Howard Thornton, Star Of ‘The Mean One’

Tis the season for Christmas horror, and this year we are being gifted with an abundance of violence and blood. One of the most anticipated films this holiday season is not about the killer Santa you would expect, but a parody about the green creature that lives on the mountain, affectionately known as The Mean One. Starring David Howard Thornton (read our other interview with him HERE) and directed by Steven LaMorte (read our interview with him HERE), The Mean One tells a slightly different tale about everyone’s favorite furry baddie that hates Christmas, and this time, the blood flows freely down the mountainside and into the tiny town below. There’s no Christmas cheer here.

To celebrate the streaming and physical releases of The Mean One, I chatted with David about why he wanted to play The Mean One, spending time in the makeup chair, Christmas horror, and more!

PopHorror: I watched The Mean One earlier this year to interview Steven, who is delightful. The movie is a ton of fun so I’m super excited to speak with you. I’m also excited the movie is coming out and more people get to watch it.

David Howard Thornton: That’s awesome!

PopHorror: What intrigued you about the project and made you want to be a part of it?

David Howard Thornton: First of all, it’s a parody of a story that I’ve loved my whole entire life, and I thought this was a fun take on it all. I was like, “This is a great idea!” Steven and I, we have a mutual friend – the Fuzz guys who worked on the Terrifier films. They all went to school together with Steven. They showed me the fake movie trailer that Steven had made. Before they decided to make this an actual movie, he had made a trailer just for shits and giggles, I guess you could say. I was like, “Oh, this is a great idea!” And he was like, “Yeah, they’re making this into a movie. They’re looking for someone to play The Mean One, would you be interested?” And I was like, “Oh, God, yes. Of course.” I also have another history with this role, I guess you could say. For five years of my life, I toured with the musical version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and I was the understudy to Stefán Karl, who was our Grinch on that tour. I learned so much from him. It was fun to be able to come back to a similar character, I guess you could say, in a different way. 

PopHorror: Christmas horror has to be one of my favorite subgenres of horror.

David Howard Thornton: Yeah!

PopHorror: I love Christmas horror, so to have a beloved family character made into this ghastly, bloody, just brutal killer is right up my alley. So, this was a dream come true. Christmas horror is taking that fun family holiday that is also cheerful and the best time of year and making it dark. This is how disturbing I am. I think it’s the best thing.

David Howard Thornton: I’m the same way. I love anything that just takes something that’s fun and cheerful and makes it dark in some way. I think it’s fun how there are other movies that are like kid movies being made into horror movies, like Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, and I guess Bambi. That’s so much fun!

PopHorror: They just did Mary Had a Little Lamb.

David Howard Thornton: Oh my God!

PopHorror: We just reviewed that for PopHorror, and we got something about Three Blind Mice, so I guess that’s coming out too.

David Howard Thornton: That’s hysterical! It seems like that’s the thing right now, taking childhood favorites and traumatizing people with what you can do with them. I saw Violent Night last year and I freaking loved it. That was such a fun movie. I love that idea of taking Christmas and just making it scary. Like Krampus, stuff like that. I just love it. Absolutely love it. I’m glad to see more people doing that.

PopHorror: Yes, me too! The Mean One is another character you play that has no dialogue in the films. You don’t have any speaking parts. How is that?

David Howard Thornton: It’s… different. I have one line in the whole movie. I say, “Go!” and that’s it. That’s just great. I don’t have to memorize lines and I kind of enjoy that, but that was a different thing for me to undertake when I first took on the role of Art the Clown because I’m a theater actor. I’m a voiceover guy. That’s always just been my thing with every character I played, I find the character usually through the voice and everything just kind of falls in place after that. I pride myself with that every character I play, I do a different voice. I feel like it changes it up. I don’t feel like I’m playing the same character, I guess you could say. That was a different thing for me, not having a voice and being able to use my biggest skill set. I do over 200 voices and 25 different dialects but the irony of it all is that now I’m known for being silent.

PopHorror: Right?! Is it a challenge to stay silent? It’s like human nature to make sounds and say something. How hard is it to just not do it?

David Howard Thornton: I wouldn’t say it’s too challenging not to say anything per se, it’s more challenging for me to not make any onomatopoeia – grunts, outtakes of breath, anything like that. That’s an instinctual thing when you get hit or something like that to make a ‘uh’ like a grunt. You even hear Jason and Michael Myers occasionally grunt when they get hit or you hear them breathe. You don’t hear any of that with Art. With The Mean One, you do hear that. You hear him growling and stuff like that. That was kind of cool. Yeah, that was definitely a challenge not making any kind of sound. In between takes I’m talking all the time and for myself – at least for both characters – even though I don’t have dialogue I say lines in my head. I make up my own dialogue, that way I’m giving myself beats to play off of and I think just organically my face will match whatever I’m saying in my head and stuff like that. I do say things, it’s just in my head. I don’t know how that makes me sound.

PopHorror: Since you don’t have any dialogue and you do have to really rely on your facial expressions and body language, was there anything that you were adamant about bringing to your character?

David Howard Thornton: Yeah, I wanted to bring… I guess in my own way doing a little tribute to Stefán since he passed away back in 2018 from cancer, I wanted to do some kind of homage to his interpretation of The Grinch. I thought he was just absolutely fantastic. So there are little bits and pieces I do in there character-wise and movement-wise that I learned from Stefán on tour, that I wanted to bring to it. I wanted to bring a little bit of that goofiness to him, a playfulness. You see my fingers are coming up and I do this little… That’s something that Stefán did a lot with the gloves that he wore in the show. They were these giant gloves with this hair going off them, so they read really well to the back of a crowd, so he was always doing big gestures with his hands and stuff like that. I wanted to bring little nods to his performance in that way.

PopHorror: I love that! With this character and also with Art the Clown, you spend a lot of time in the makeup chair.

David Howard Thornton: Yeah!

PopHorror: What is that like and how do you pass the time?

David Howard Thornton: It’s not too bad. I mean, it’s just a lot of sitting there and letting people glue stuff to your face or airbrush your face. Just do things to your face. Starting off for Terrifier, it took about four hours but now we’ve gotten it down to about an hour and a half. We’ve streamlined the process. For The Mean One as well, that was about four hours of sitting in a makeup chair and having things glued to my face. My wonderful makeup artist, Tatjana [Bluchel], did all this airbrushing. Her airbrushing skills are amazing!

PopHorror: They are!

David Howard Thornton: I had no idea what to expect when I first saw myself in the mirror. I just feel air being blown on my face the entire time; I have no idea what it’s going to look like. I was like, is this going to look like some kid’s art or something like that? But oh wow! Just amazing details that she was putting in there. It’s a true skillset. I kind of passed the time just by talking. I can be quite the chatterbox.

PopHorror: You have to get it all out.

David Howard Thornton: Oh yeah. I definitely do, I definitely do. I think that’s how Damien [director Leone] and I really bonded the first time on set for Terrifier because that was him doing my makeup the whole entire time. It was like four plus hours a day putting it on and taking it off. We’d chat about movies and all our other interests and stuff like that. Same thing with Tatjana and the rest of the makeup team. We just killed a lot of time, played a lot of music and stuff like that. It was kind of fun. I think makeup artists know more about the actors on a set than anybody else does because that’s what happens. You’re sitting in the makeup chair and it’s almost like a therapy session, in a way.

PopHorror: Oh, I believe it. The details of The Mean One’s face, that was one thing that really stood out to me. It was phenomenal and one of the best parts of the movie. She has some mad skills.

David Howard Thornton: Mad skills, and what’s so funny too about that prosthetic – the two prophetic pieces she used – was that it was from a dog mask, just painted. She adapted it in a very creative way. The only thing that sucked about it was the snout part was built for a much smaller nose.

PopHorror: Like a child?

David Howard Thornton: Yeah, like a child’s nose. It was crazy. They also didn’t put nose holes in there. There were no air holes in that. It sucked because I’m mouth breathing the whole entire time. They did their best to try to drill some holes in there for me, but it still didn’t give me that much to breathe through. I understand now why Jim Carrey kind of talked the way he did in the first Grinch movie because when your whole nasal passage is closed off, you kind of talk like that the whole time anyway. It just naturally happens. When I would chat with people on set, I would pretty much sound like the Jim Carrey Grinch.

PopHorror: You’re a fan favorite and frequent guest at horror conventions. What’s your favorite part of connecting with your fans?

David Howard Thornton: I just love hanging out with people. I love to go to the afterparties and stuff like that. I think that’s a lot of fun. When I’m at the table, I’m usually rushed to get through everybody because I’ll usually have a long line of people, and I don’t really get to talk to people the way I want to talk with them. So I like going to the afterparties so I can sit down and chat with the fans and get to know them as people, and they can get to know me as a person. It’s always the weirdest thing to me when people are freaking out when they come up to meet me and they’re shaking or whatever. It’s just me. I’m a geek like everybody else here so let’s just sit down and chat.

PopHorror: That is the best thing to hear. You have a very loyal fan base. What is up next for you?

David Howard Thornton: I’m going to be filming Terrifier 3. We’re getting started filming in I believe January. Of course, the strikes have kind of delayed a few things and stuff like that, but we’ve applied for the interim agreement just in case the strike isn’t over by January. I think they announced today that there’s going to be an extra three minutes or so at the end of the rerelease of Terrifier 2 in theaters and we’re going to show a sneak preview of Terrifier 3. We filmed a little something before the strike happened. It’s been a hard thing to sit on. I’m glad I can finally talk about the direction we’re going with Terrifier 3 in probably a month. It’s going to give you a good idea of the thematic elements we’re going to have part 3 and I think people are going to be very, very, very excited about that, so I’m excited about that. But I have two other new films that should be coming out in the next year as well, and I can talk about them because they’ve also applied for the interim agreements. The first one is called The Dead Place, and I actually talk in this one for once! So that’s going to be fun. I play a pretty bad, despicable character in this one. He’s like a child killer and stuff like that. He’s kind of like the comic relief in some ways too. He’s very chatty, I guess you could say. He’s very fun. He’s called The New Kid and I had a lot of fun with him. The other one is called Stream, and we did this with a lot of the Terrifier 2 team. Started filming during the pandemic so that was crazy, but Damien’s doing the practical effects so you know those kills are going to be pretty awesome. The cast for this thing is like a who’s who of horror celebrities. It’s kind of like the Expendables version of a horror movie – Felissa Rose, Dave Sheridan, Danielle Harris, Dee Wallace, Daniel Roebuck, Terry Alexander, Tim Reid, Jeffrey Combs, Tony Todd – there’s so many other people I’m still not allowed to mention yet that’s in it. That was a lot of fun to film because being on set with all these people I grew up watching in films.

PopHorror: I bet!

David Howard Thornton: Especially getting to watch Jeffrey Combs work. That was a lot of fun. Some days on set I was like, “I’m not in the scene or anything like that, but I can just come and watch?” That was like a master’s class in character work. He’s just fantastic. It was amazing. I was like, “Teach me!”

PopHorror: That’s so awesome!

David Howard Thornton: Yeah! So, both of those should be coming out in the next year. I don’t know exactly when but soon. I know they’re both in post-production right now, pretty much done with post-production so it should be in the coming months, I would say.

PopHorror: I’m excited to see what you have coming up and I’m excited to see you have some talking roles.

David Howard Thornton: Yeah, that should be fun! I actually had to memorize lines again.

PopHorror: Just one last question for you today. What would be your weapon of choice in a zombie apocalypse?

David Howard Thornton: Oh, that’s a fun one! My gosh… Weapon of choice… I would probably go with a sword. Not a samurai sword because those things could break too easily and stuff like that. Those aren’t really meant for that kind of combat. I would say like a broad sword or something like that. That would be fun. Or a machete.

Thank you so much to David for taking the time to speak with us. The Mean One is now available on VOD, DVD, and Blu-ray!