star went from zero to sixty in record time. The English actor turned the equivalent of a high school musical into representation, which led to a two-line day on and an acclaimed performance at London’s Park Theatre. Toward the end of his run on stage in , he put himself on tape for , the long-awaited sequel to Tim Burton and ’s 1988 genre mashup, .
Unexpectedly, Conti soon found himself in the middle of a Zoom callback with Burton and the town’s newly anointed superstar, . Within two hours, Conti officially landed the role of Jeremy Frazier, who Ortega’s character, Astrid Deetz, would eventually refer to as her “date from hell.” Astrid — having been estranged from her mother, Lydia ( ), since the divorce and death of her father Richard (Santiago Cabrera) — reluctantly joins the Deetz family on a trip to Winter River, Connecticut in order to bury her grandpa Charles Deetz.
When her mother’s TV show producer/boyfriend, Rory (Justin Theroux), turns the funeral into an engagement party, an aggravated Astrid flees her family’s famous ghost house by bicycle. After nearly causing a multi-vehicle accident, Astrid crashes her bike into Jeremy’s backyard where he happens to be reading Fyodor Dostoevsky’s in a treehouse. The pair then bond over his reading material before he eventually offers an open-ended invitation for her to return the next day.
While some viewers immediately noticed that something wasn’t quite right about Jeremy, their follow-up scene wher.