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Graziadei on Sex, Death and Videotape

“I’ve always loved horror movies and I finally got to do one!” raves THE YOUNG AND THE RESTLESS’ Michael Graziadei, who completed work on Boogeyman 2 in March. “The sequel has nothing to do with the first one and doesn’t pick up where it ended. This one is based in a hospital where people are dealing with different problems. One girl’s bulimic, one girl cuts herself, and my character (Darren) is agoraphobic. It’s about the relationships these people have and how their fears manifest themselves. Their fears take over, and that’s how they finally meet their demise.”

As a horror connoisseur, Graziadei has no problem boasting about the project. “It’s scary,” he promises. “It’s awesome, because it has that old-school horror flare with the brutal slasher killings, but it’s not gross for the sake of being gross or brutal for being brutal. It has a psychological edge, but there are no stupid scenes where a character is walking down a spooky hall when he shouldn’t be. It was also shot very artistically. It’s cold and sterile.”

Working in a new genre, Graziadei got to try a few new tricks. “Darren’s a badass who has problems with everyone and doesn’t let anyone get close to him,” he notes. “The expressions, actions and the way the character carried himself were completely different than what I do here [at Y&R]. It was fun to see me as a completely different character.”

Graziadei got a kick out of shooting his first death scene, which he calls “challenging and interesting,” and also his first R-rated sex scene. “I had to drop trou’ for it! I had my front taped up, but everything in the back was hanging right out,” he reveals with a smile. “I thought it was going to be weird, but it wasn’t. The scene was with a friend of mine, Chrissy (Griffith), whom I had acting class with when I first moved out to L.A. That made it easy, because we already knew each other. We’d hung out. I had a girlfriend and she had a boyfriend, so nothing was awkward. It was work. And it was a closed set: just the director and the cameramen.”

The movie will be shopped in June, so there’s no release date yet, but it could be this fall or early 2008. “We’ll see if it goes to the big screen. I heard that Sam Raimi, who directed Spider-Man and a bunch of big horror films [like the Evil Dead movies], attached himself on the production end; having his name attached doesn’t hurt,” relates a hopeful Graziadei. “Sony was digging the dailies and loving the cast. I worked with a bunch of kids with astounding resumes. Tobin Bell, who was the killer in the Saw films, was also in it. He was amazing to work with.”

Stay tuned for more on Boogeyman 2.

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