‘Touch Me’ actor Paget Brewster on horror movies: ‘I can’t scream’

LOS ANGELES, March 20 (UPI) — Paget Brewster would love to do more horror movies but she has one hurdle she can’t overcome — she can’t scream. She appears in Touch Me, in New York theaters Friday and more theaters March 27.

Touch Me writer/director Addison Heimann found a way around it. In a recent Zoom interview with UPI, Brewster said she could never be a scream queen.

“I love it but I can’t scream,” Brewster, 57, said. “I just couldn’t do it when I was younger so I never got to be a victim. I’ve tried to get into indie horror films. Cast me as a doctor and just show me dead. Don’t show me being killed.”

Heimann cast Brewster in his previous film, Hypochondriac. When he had a role for her in Touch Me, he texted her.

“That’s pretty much how I get jobs now,” Brewster said. “Directors and writers text me and say, ‘Hey, do you want to do this?’ And I say, ‘Yeah, sure, let’s do it’. Then I call my manager and we put it together.”

Paget Brewster, seen in Season 18 of “Criminal Minds” on Paramount+, hopes Season 19 isn’t its last. Photo courtesy of Paramount+

Touch Me stars Olivia Taylor Dudley as Joey, a woman with few prospects who returns to her alien ex-boyfriend, Brian (Lou Taylor Pucci), because she needs a place to live. She brings her roommate, Craig (Jordan Gavaris) with her and they form a love triangle.

Brewster is in one scene as a rude coffee shop customer who complains about her order. Joey stands up to her.

Paget Brewster, seen in “Criminal Minds” on Paramount+, hopes there is a Sesaon 20 and more. Photo courtesy of Paramount+

“I think my character was looking for a fight,” Brewster said. “I feel like road rage people can be like that. They’re looking for an altercation and those people terrify me so it was fun to play one.”

Joey slaps the complaining woman, who retaliates. Brewster said it was all well-choreographed.

“There’s a way to do it so that you don’t get hurt,” Brewster said. “I’m not Faye Dunaway. I didn’t want her to actually pop me in the face. I was more scared of throwing that iced/no ice latte in her face. That actually we had to do that a couple of times.”

After the confrontation, the rest of the film deals with Joey and Craig vying for Brian’s attention and exploring codependence and pleasure with his alien tentacles. Brewster found that thematic exploration through horror/sci-fi consistent with Heimann’s previous film.

“What he’s explored in both Hypochondriac and Touch Me is his journey into introspection and figuring out who he is and what his damage,” Brewster said. “A deeper level to it that’s really interesting and that may even be more frightening than the idea of an alien being trying to take over Earth is what are we as Eartlings?”

After Touch Me comes out, Brewster will appear in 10 more episodes of Criminal Minds which she filmed in September, following Touch Me‘s January 2025 Sundance Film Festival premiere. Brewster and co-stars are hoping for at least one more season as these 10 constitute Season 19.

“We really don’t want to end on Season 19,” she said. “We’d like to have a Season 20. We’d like to have a Season 25, frankly. We really enjoy it and have a great time together, so fingers crossed that we’ll get a call that we’re going to do more.”

Brewster joined the cast in Season 2 but was fired after Season 6. She returned in Season 12 and has been on the show ever since.

“When they fired me, I got mad, and I wouldn’t come back even though they said sorry and tried to get me to come back,” Brewster said. “Fans would come up to me and say, ‘Why aren’t you on Criminal Minds?’ After four years, I was like, ‘Why aren’t I on Criminal Minds? I think I will go back.’ It was very fortunate that I was able to rejoin the show.”