'The Bad Seed Returns' Matures Emma Thanks to Real-Life Father-Daughter Writing Duo Mckenna Grace and Ross Burge

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Mckenna Grace was filming The Handmaid's Tale in Toronto, Canada, but her father, orthopedic surgeon Dr. Ross Burge, was working on a research study at USC's Keck Medical Center. Both projects got shut down for a short time, as the world adjusted to keeping everyone safe amid a virus for which there was not yet a vaccine. In their newly free time, they decided to dust off an older idea: writing a sequel to The Bad Seed, the 2018 Lifetime remake of the 1956 movie of the same title in which Grace starred as the titular character.

The father-daughter duo had been working on writing a few projects together for a long time, but since, as Burge recalls, Lifetime had been interested in doing a sequel but there was no script for it, they got to work on one. (They both also serve as executive producers on the film.)

"It all started with a vision of her being a teenager, sitting on a swing set in a park at dusk, by herself. And she was eyeing this dog that was along a chain link fence, and her eyes are just dead because there's nothing behind her because she's not in front of people, she doesn't have to put a mask on," Burge tells Metacritic. "It opens where you go, 'Is she just doing things to do things?' and you start to understand motive later."

That vision became the opening sequence in The Bad Seed returns, which sees Grace reprise her role of Emma, who now lives in a new town with her aunt Angela (Michelle Morgan), step-uncle Robert (Benjamin Ayres), and their baby. She has escaped the events of the first film, which concluded with the death of her father (played by Rob Lowe), relatively unscathed and has managed to grow into herself as a young woman who knows how to mold herself to be popular with both the adults and other teenagers in her life. Of course, underneath, she still harbors deeply violent tendencies that take barely a minute before they show themselves. And to add extra complications into the mix, someone from her past ends up in this new town with her, threatening to spill more than what Emma has thus far shared about the bodies that have dropped around her.

"We obviously had to introduce some sort of interesting problem because Emma's living life comfy right now. She's living with her aunt, the baby, her uncle, [and] sure they're kind of annoying, but right now they aren't posing a major threat. So it just happens that this person comes into her life who was at her old school, has an inkling that something's going on, catches her at a wrong time, and then everything starts to fall into place for Emma," Grace tells Metacritic. "'Oh, I guess since she's doing this, maybe I could get rid of another problem. Then I could get rid of this and kind of knock everybody over like dominoes.' She just had to wait for the perfect moment."

Grace adds that as she and Burge were writing the script (later joined by Barbara Marshall, who wrote the previous installment), they focused on the story first and then adapted the circumstances to adjust to the fact that Grace would be in her mid-teens when playing the character again.

"In the first movie, she was much more subdued and didn't really fit in — she wasn't a social butterfly — now she gets to start over in a different town and we join her after she's flourished and she's built this new reputation, this new life for herself," Burge says. "But I was writing it with the idea that Mckenna is going to play Emma, of course, so I was definitely not going to write something like Euphoria!"

Still, the level of violence a teenager can accomplish can sometimes be much greater than what the younger Emma pulled off in the original film, even if simply because teenagers have more access to dangerous items, including vehicles.

"I feel like you and I egged each other on whenever it came to coming up with plans or whatever she does because we're both big horror movie fans," Grace says to Burge during the interview with Metacritic.

"In the original script that we wrote, it was very dark because we didn't know if Lifetime would take it and we wanted to be able to turn it into something else," Burge admits. "It was very violent. And I would love to see that that version to one day. But when Lifetime was sold on the idea, we had to change a lot because of some rules about kids hurting kids."

Being that the duo loves horror movies, they do pay homage to some other classics in their film, including Pet Sematary (pay attention to the baby's name!). Their process when writing was for Burge to "scaffold everything" and send Grace pages via a shared Google Drive. She would then give feedback, especially on dialogue. 

"As an actor, whenever I'm on screen and on set and whatnot, I always like to — if the director is open to it — adjust the script just a small amount, whether it's adding an 'and' or replacing a word, just to make it feel a little bit more authentic," Grace says.

But just as quickly as Burge is quick to point out how Grace has "lived and breathed" the world of film and television for the last decade and therefore is an authority on things like look book pitches and dialogue, Grace is just as fast to defer to him when it comes to medical content. And The Bad Seed franchise does feature important psychology, including seeing Emma "practice" her facial expressions and voice inflections in a mirror before certain social situations.

"The original novel with William March was nature versus nurture and then ended up in psychology textbooks and studied for years, where now it's a common term that we use," Burge points out. "We weren't trying to portray any true mental disorder because you can't call them a psychopath until they're over 18 by the DSM criteria. So, looking at people, you say, 'Oh, well, that's how they function. They are the hero of their own narrative, they're the center of their own world — but to the extreme.' That's how [Emma] functions: She's a creature of, 'How do these people serve me?' And then the acts that she puts on and her portrayals only are to benefit her; she's very superficial in that regard."

"She cares for these situations, she enjoys them, until she doesn't: 'That was fun, I had a good time with you, but now you're just becoming too much of a problem,'" Grace adds. "I feel like it's an interesting contrast because that's how you started off and then you show her living comfortably and yes, she's chilling, but she still has that weird urge or whatever is going on with her even though she's living how she wants to. I think the longer it goes on, I don't know how Emma will keep it up. I'm sure she will, but I think it'll be fun to see how."

The Bad Seed returns premieres Sept. 5 on Lifetime.

Get to know Mckenna Grace:
Grace got her professional acting start in 2013 with an episode of The Goodwin Games (Metascore: 57) and on The Young & the Restless, but she quickly racked up credits across film and TV, including Once Upon a Time (66), The Haunting of Hill House (79), Captain Marvel (64), Troop Zero (58), Young Sheldon (63), and the aforementioned Handmaid's Tale (82). She also sings

Get to know Ross Burge:
This is Burge's first film as a writer and producer, but as an actor he appeared in the feature films Should I Be Good? and Perfect Strangers.