10 Cloverfield Lane star Mary Elizabeth Winstead has revealed that she had "no idea" she was making a Cloverfield movie while it was in production.
In case you didn't know, Dan Trachtenberg's 10 Cloverfield Lane initially began life as a spec script titled The Cellar and it was later shot under the codename "Valencia" before morphing into a Cloverfield spinoff. Winstead recently told Collider that she only found out about the movie's connection to the Cloverfield universe right before its theatrical release.
"I had no idea it was a Cloverfield movie!" Winstead admitted. "It was an idea that was floated around but wasn't something that was really, officially like, 'This is part of that universe.' It was its own standalone film and then, just before the movie came out, spoke with JJ [Abrams] and it was like, 'Oh no, this is gonna be part of the Cloverfield franchise.'
"I really didn't know what to think of it at first," Winstead said, reflecting on the moment she found out the movie was part of the series. "I hadn't really wrapped my brain around it and then, once everything got laid out and it made sense and the marketing for it came out, I was like, 'Oh, I see how this fits together, this kind of puzzle,' and it's actually really smart."
The 2016 film tells the story of a young woman named Michelle, portrayed by Winstead, who, after getting into a car accident, wakes up to find herself being held in an underground bunker with two men who claim the outside world is affected by a widespread mysterious attack, and that their only hope of survival is to remain sheltered inside the cellar.
Trachtenberg previously told IGN that surprisingly very little about the project changed after it was decided that it would become a spiritual successor to Cloverfield. He said they had considered some connections, such as whether to include the satellite from the first movie, but ultimately it was only the one shot of the mailbox that they added later on.
Since 10 Cloverfield Lane's release, there has been one further installment in the monster movie franchise. The third movie in the series, The Cloverfield Paradox, found its way onto Netflix in 2018. And while we called the movie's plotting too predictable in our review, it was very interesting to see how it managed to tie the whole Cloverfield universe together.
Adele Ankers is a freelance writer for IGN. Follow her on Twitter.