Silent Hill 2 remake actor's "most difficult scene" is an iconic moment from the horror game: "I was really making sure I didn't cry"

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The Silent Hill 2 remake was an emotional journey for the cast

Silent Hill 2
(Image credit: Konami)

There are several powerful moments in Silent Hill 2, but none hit quite as hard as Mary reading her letter to James. "You made me happy," is just a crushing final line, and the delivery from Monica Taylor Horgan is timeless.

Coming into the remake, Salóme Gunnarsdóttir had big shoes to fill, portraying Mary, especially in this scene. Answering questions from fans on Twitch, she addressed the hardest scene for her to record, going straight to that infamous bit of correspondence.

Gunnarsdóttir applied this philosophy to Silent Hill 2, but she found it hard going. "I was really making sure that I didn't cry, because I didn't want to take that for me, I wanted to leave that for other people," she recalls.

"he first day we did mocap, we did a reading of the letter at the end of the day. And I was pregnant, so I found it very hard to read through that. [There were] a lot of emotions. But I kept them. The way they taught us is that you put the lid on the pot, and you try to stop it from boiling."

Comparisons sprang forth to Horgan, who cried during her recording of Mary's letter, but wisely, Gunnarsdóttir put those aside and focused on simply doing her own rendition. Even the guidance on-set was minimal.

"We did a few takes, they were all just one whole reading of the letter. They were doing the really nice thing that they did in everything, which was really honoring the original," she remembers. "They were just like, 'Hey, come here and we need you to read this.' They didn't explain to me the context of what the original was and what people loved about it, [or] how they would want me to match it."

The result is a different, but no less beautiful take on a heart-wrenching moment. The kind of thing we all hear… in our restless dreams.

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Anthony McGlynn
Anthony McGlynn
Contributing Writer

Anthony is an Irish entertainment and games journalist, now based in Glasgow. He previously served as Senior Anime Writer at Dexerto and News Editor at The Digital Fix, on top of providing work for Variety, IGN, Den of Geek, PC Gamer, and many more. Besides Studio Ghibli, horror movies, and The Muppets, he enjoys action-RPGs, heavy metal, and pro-wrestling. He interviewed Animal once, not that he won’t stop going on about it or anything.

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