You Always Remember Your First: ‘Orphan’ Prequel Trailer Teases Esther’s ‘First Kill’
Before she was “Esther,” she was Leena.
The prequel to the 2009 horror hit Orphan, titled Orphan: First Kill, focuses on the orphan known as Esther, who in the original movie was a murderous woman pretending to be a child. This movie gives the backstory of Leena Klammer, played by Isabelle Fuhrman.
“Following an escape from an Estonian psychiatric facility, Leena comes to America by impersonating the missing daughter of a wealthy Connecticut family,” an official synopsis reads. “But Leena’s new life as ‘Esther’ comes with an unexpected wrinkle and pits her against a mother who will protect her family at any cost.”
Julia Stiles plays the mother, with Rossif Sutherland, Matthew Finlan, and Hiro Kanagawa also starring. Alex Mace, Hal Sadoff, and Ethan Erwin produced the film along with James Tomlinson.
Fuhrman herself is serving as an associate producer, having given story writer David Leslie Johnson an idea for the prequel after watching a 2019 Dr. Phil episode in which a Ukrainian orphan is accused of lying about her age.
The 25-year-old Fuhrman told The Hollywood Reporter that she relishes the challenge of playing a 9-year-old character – without any CGI de-aging, although she does have a body double played by Kennedy Irwin.
“I love the challenge of being able to play a kid because that’s never historically been done in cinema,” Fuhrman said. “I was like looking all this up — because I love looking up old movie history and things like that — and I was like, ‘Oh, an adult has never reprised the role that they played as a child.’”
“It doesn’t make any sense. I was like, ‘How do I revisit this part and then also convincingly play a kid?’ Because that was the easy part last time — the hard part was trying to be an adult! Now the hard part is I have to be a kid,” Fuhrman continued.
Orphan: First Kill is coming from Paramount+ and will be available to stream exclusively on on that platform, and also will be available to purchase on Digital beginning Friday, August 19th in the US. The film will also debut in limited theaters.
