Immaculate star Sydney Sweeney overcame phobia for nun horror movie

Madame Web's Sydney Sweeney managed to overcome a phobia while playing Sister Cecilia in her new horror movie Immaculate.

Attending its premiere at South by Southwest, the actress was asked by Den of Geek how one particularly manic and bloody-faced scene was crafted.

"I have a phobia of needles," revealed Sweeney, whose character joins a remote convent in the Italian countryside only to unearth some unspeakable terrors. Needles do make a cameo somewhere in there, too, with the star transmitting this most medically sinister of fears into something "guttural" for our entertainment on screen.

"I usually just start crying and screaming and thrashing around," she said.

"I don't know how to describe it. Since I was young, I was able to jump in and out of my characters. I had someone who told me it was really important to separate myself from my characters as much as possible, and it's allowed me to jump in the moment we call action and jump out the moment we call cut."

Meanwhile, Immaculate's final script made some huge changes from the time Sweeney first heard about the project back in 2014 - before her break as Cassie Howard in HBO's teen drama Euphoria.

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"Originally, the script was not set in a convent, she wasn't a nun. It was a boarding school," she shared.

"We wanted to elevate the film in a different way, and add multiple different concepts to the story that people draw different themes from as they watch it. So I look at it as this is just her own character's journey. And she happens to have her journey with God."

Michael Mohan directs from a script written by Andrew Lobel.

Immaculate is released in cinemas on March 22.

Watch: Sydney Sweeney unfazed by Madame Web's box office flop