Though the Scream films are anything but lacking in character deaths, the writer of the slasher franchise’s second installment says there’s one character that he actually regrets killing off.

In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Scream 2 writer Kevin Williamson shared that horror fanatic Randy Meeks (played by Last Call’s Jamie Kennedy) would have lived past the second movie if the screenwriter knew the franchise “was going to live and live.”

Williamson, who hasn’t written any Scream scripts since the 1997 sequel to Wes Craven’s original killer classic, said that Randy was an unfortunate casualty of necessity.

“I thought if you kill someone really important to the audience in the middle, it just ups the stakes. Everything’s off the table. I knew we weren’t going to kill Sidney [Neve Campbell], I knew we weren’t going to kill Gale [Courtney Cox] or Dewey [David Arquette]. Those three characters, for Scream 2 were safe, and so I had to look to the secondary characters,” he said.

With Campbell, Cox, and Arquette’s character’s safe—at least for the time being—Williamson needed a beloved character’s death to further enrage the audience against masked killer Ghostface. Kennedy’s Randy was regretfully, the most convenient option.

“I love Randy, I would have given him a much bigger life had I known this franchise was going to live and live. I would have loved for him to be a legacy character. At the time, I thought it would just be the punch in the gut the audience needed at that time, to really get mad, and get mad at the killer,” the screenwriter said.

Jamie Kennedy Says He Doesn’t Regret the Scream Franchise One Bit

     Miramax

While Randy met a grisly end in Scream 2, and plans for the actor to make a surprise re-appearance in future sequels fell through, Kennedy has no regrets about his time in the horror franchise.

In 2021, the actor recalled working with director Wes Craven and co-star Courtney Cox, telling The Hollywood Reporter:

“Wes said to me, ‘When you’re making a horror movie, the experience doesn’t have to be horrific.’ It’s one of the greatest quotes I ever heard. We made this crazy movie, but we drank wine at night and had these civilized dinners,” Kennedy said.

As filming neared an end and the actor began to face the finality of his character’s death, things got emotional—but Gale actress Cox had some further words of wisdom.

“Toward the end of the shoot, I was getting really sad that the movie was ending and I started to cry. Courtney was like, ‘Oh, honey. Don’t cry. This is the way it is. It’s summer camp.’ I’m like, ‘But this is my life.’ She goes, ‘No, honey. It’s only your life for three months, but we all have a bond that we’ll never forget.’”

Randy Meeks might have been brutally killed, but the Scream legacy lives on—the sixth installment, Scream 6, hacks its way into theaters in 2023.