After nabbing an Emmy for her performance as Sofia Falcone in HBO’s dark drama “The Penguin,” Cristin Milioti was looking for something lighter.
She found it in “Buddy,” a horror comedy about escaping a kids television show.
“One of the other reasons I wanted to do this was because I was looking for something lighter, and this felt really light to me,” Milioti told TheWrap at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. “It’s such an interesting thing to go through the 24 hours of press being like, ‘This movie is wild.’ And I was like, ‘I really found it light.’”
The film, which is premiering in the Midnight section, is Casper Kelly’s highly anticipated feature directorial debut that centers on a children’s show overruled by a terrifying Barney-esque mascot. Along with Milioti, “Buddy” also stars Keegan-Michael Key, Topher Grace and Delaney Quinn.
For Milioti, the appeal was immediate, praising the film as “demented and strange.”
“I don’t know, I guess I’m also, maybe, a little bit of a sicko,” she added. “To me, it felt light and moving and beautiful, even though horrors happen in it. I hadn’t read anything like it.”
Milioti was drawn to the film’s Steven Spielberg influences, particularly “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” “Casper and I talked about this a lot when we first met,” she said. “There were so many elements that reminded me of the Spielberg movies I grew up on. Like, someone’s sort of mania being like, I know something isn’t right. The beautiful dinner table scenes where his son is watching him and crying. There’s just metaphors upon metaphors upon metaphors.”
But the real attraction was the practical effects. “I was so interested in what it would feel like to work with that many kids, and also to be in a completely practical world,” Milioti continued. “I’ve acted a lot across from tennis balls, and that has its own interesting challenges. But to get to be in a completely practical set and see this sort of masterful technicianship of these puppeteers, how they’re operated and how they’re built.”
The experience reminded her of classic ’80s filmmaking, even wondering if it was similar to what it was like making “The Dark Crystal.”
She added: “It kind of fed into my own nostalgia. I wonder how much of it I was also drawn to, wanting to return to something, because those movies are sort of rare and rarer.”
In his review of the film, TheWrap’s Casey Loving wrote: “At the center of the film is Delaney Quinn of last year’s ‘If I Had Legs I’d Kick You’ as Freddy. She is a young girl who is trapped in a seemingly never-ending cycle of a children’s television program that is overseen by the overbearing Buddy, a unicorn who stomps about whenever he gets mad and seems right on the cusp of snapping.”
Quinn, who has wanted to be in a horror movie since age four, was struck by the practical approach. “When I first saw Buddy, I was like, ‘Oh, he looks like a stuffed animal,’” Quinn recalled. “He’s not. He is not fluffy or cute or sweet.”
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