After Wes Craven’s Scream debuted in 1996, Hollywood stars coveted the opportunity to die onscreen in the film’s many sequels. Jada Pinkett Smith was given the honor of being the slasher’s first kill in Scream 2, following in the footsteps of Drew Barrymore, who took on that mantle of Victim No. 1 the original.
Pinkett Smith did not take that honor lightly and was determined to show out, with one gruesome request for Craven. “I remember saying to the director at the time, ‘I want to die the most horrific death that has ever happened in a horror film,'” she told PeopleTV during an episode of Couch Surfing, around the five-minute mark in the video below. “‘I want it to be long and excruciating.'”
Unsurprisingly the macabre request didn’t phase Craven, who simply responded, “Cool.”
In the end, Pinkett Smith received a horrific, meta film-within-a-film death during the movie’s long opener, where a couple attends a movie dubbed Stab. She takes a stab to the gut, and several more to the back as she attempts to escape before finally collapsing in front of the meta-movie audience. The scene is so popular that a clip of it on YouTube has more than 3 million views, even though the film came out in 1997.
Throughout the rest of the Couch Surfing episode, Smith talks about some of her other iconic roles in films such as A Different World, Set It Off, The Nutty Professor, Ali, and her 2017 summer blockbuster Girls Trip.