Firsts With Maika Monroe: The 'It Follows' Star on Getting Started as Movie Extra and in Pizza Hut Commercial

It Follows, the creepy indie horror hit that’s riding a wave of great reviews into 12,000 theaters this weekend, should push its breakout actress Maika Monroe (pronounced “Micah”) on the path to stardom. Monroe, who also drew praise for last year’s campy actioner The Guest, stars as Jay, an aimless college student who acquires what you might you call a sexually transmitted demon.

The 21-year-old native of Santa Barbara, California, already has a promising slate of post-Follows projects in the pipeline, including next year’s YA-based extraterrestrial thriller The 5th Wave and the surfing drama The Tribes of Palos Verdes (no stranger to water sports, Monroe is also a professional kiteboarder).

With a bright future ahead, we asked Monroe about her past in a new episode of Yahoo Movies’ Firsts, which you can watch above. Monroe proves she had horror cred long before It Follows, making her film debut as an extra in the 2006 low-budget slasher film Bad Blood when she was 13. The movie didn’t have STD-ghosts, but it did give her the acting bug. “I saw how a movie was made, and I was just in awe.”

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Her first paid acting gig, however, was a Pizza Hut commercial plugging Fettuccine Alfredo. “We had to eat that for about eight hours shooting that, and I don’t think I had pasta for like five months after that before it was so disgusting.” Monroe insists the clip us on YouTube, but we haven’t been able to find it.  Let us know if you have better luck.

It Follows expands to theaters nationwide on Friday. Watch the trailer here: