Interview with Kenneth Trujillo from ‘I Will Never Leave You Alone’

Would you stay trapped in a haunted house for six days if it meant your freedom? Kenneth Trujillo’s character takes on the challenge in writer/director DW Medoff’s latest horror film I Will Never Leave You Alone.

It’s a bit of a standard horror story set up: a man is asked to stay in a haunted house for a number of days as a way to ‘prove’ the ghosts aren’t there. But in Medoff’s I Will Never Leave You Alone, there’s a difference. Our lead Richard Marwood (Kenneth Trujillo) is an ex-con on parole for involuntary manslaughter, with the stay part of the terms of his release. (He is hired by a real estate agent who does ‘supernatural cleansing’ as part of the job. He has to stay with no contact and no leaving in order to ‘evict’ the evil spirits from the house.)

Oh, and did I mention he’s selectively mute from some trauma we end up discovering along the way?

I screened the movie in preparation for an interview with Trujillo (full review to come separately). It is a tragic and intense movie, and Trujillo pretty much spends a good 80% of the movie by himself and not speaking. Talk about your acting challenges!

I asked Trujillo what drew him to the part. “The story had a lot of layers. That’s really what drew me to it,” he said. “At first glance, it’s a horror film. But what would lead somebody to take on this type of job that would put them in this type of harm’s way? And then everything that was built into who Richard was as a person was way more complicated than [that] he’s just a guy who’s living in this house who’s going to be tortured.”

He doesn’t have a lot of horror on his IMDb page, so I asked whether he considers himself a fan, which he does. “I think that horror, a lot of times, leads the way,” Trujillo said. “It doesn’t take a lot to make a horror film, as long as it’s a good story. People always have such a different take on what a horror film is to them and what a horror film should be. I am a fan of just the grassroots of making a good old indie horror. The horror genre has such a great fan base because some of these films have become cult classics. Some of these films have been so innovative.”

As I wrote above, his character is selectively mute and doesn’t talk for a good chunk of the film. I asked what kind of research he did to make that aspect more authentic. He not only did research on those who are selectively mute, but the amount and kind of trauma that causes that to happen.

As well, I asked that – since it is such an emotional role – whether he was affected by the part. He said that he was, and he didn’t start feeling better until two weeks after the production wrapped. He stated that Katerina Eichenberger, who plays Emma Marwood, helped, since she was his scene partner for many of the few scenes he did have with someone else. Medoff also helped.

I asked him what his favorite part of filming was. “It was everything that everybody brought to set every day,” he said, adding to his comments about the toil the role took. “We had been working so many days successively, and the good humor of everybody on set provided an ounce of levity throughout the hard days of shooting. That was just a great thing to look forward to every day, knowing that today’s another hard day, but I’m getting to work with people with a great sense of humor and who care about the thing that we’re doing.”

I asked if he felt any pressure regarding the fact that so much of the movie depends on him and his performance. “I think that what ended up helping was the order in which we shot it,” he responded. “The majority of all my interactions with the people that you see happened in the beginning. So, I guess in a sense, I was alone I but I wasn’t. I was carrying with me all the experiences that I had with these characters. [It] really helped me, because shooting in that house for the amount of days that we shot after I was done interacting with most of the other characters, it gets a little squirrely, it gets a little hazy. You try to find your footing, of where we’re starting today as opposed to where we ended last night, and vice versa.”

Trujillo’s character ends in some (to not spoil the end of the film) interesting makeup, to say the least. He said it took a good hour to an hour and a half to apply it, and, “The worst part is the aftermath: getting cleaned up after the issue and the adhesives of that takes a while for it to kind of come off,” he said with a laugh. “I didn’t have everything fully removed or fallen off till probably a couple days after shooting. Even with a handful of showers, it’s still there in the applicants to remove it.”

I asked what he hoped the audience would get out of the film. “I hope that people can see how f**ked up of a love story this is, truly,” Trujillo said. ” I know it’s set to horror, but in my heart of hearts, when I’ve looked at this story, when I talked to Katerina, when I talked to DW about the film, that’s how I saw it. I saw it as this really, really dark love story of this love lost, of lost potential.”

Would he stay in a haunted house for six days without any contact? “It would have to be a lot more money than they paid,” he joked.

When asked if he believes in the supernatural and ghosts, Trujillo stalls. “I don’t know. That’s my most honest answer: I don’t know.” He continued, “I know that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. So, what happens to us when things are over? Who’s to not say that some remnants of a person have stayed here or there – somewhere where they found comfort? And then, going into a role like this, when you start to research places and things that are deemed haunted and you hear the retelling of these experiences of people who have been there, you hear some really interesting, weird, off-putting kind of stories which always just amplify the ‘I don’t know’.”

I Will Never Leave You Alone premieres on VOD/digital platforms on October 18, 2024. More information about the film can be found on the official website, and more information about Kenneth Trujillo can be found on his website.

Author: Angie Fiedler Sutton

Angie Fiedler Sutton is a writer, podcaster, and all-round fangirl geek. She has been published in Den of Geek, Stage Directions, LA Weekly, The Mary Sue, and others.

She also produces her own podcast, Contents May Vary, where she interviews geeky people about geeky things. You can see all her work (and social media channels) at angiefsutton.com.

Help support independent journalism. Subscribe to our Patreon.

Copyright © The Geekiary