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A Five Nights at Freddy’s star thought she was auditioning for a Freddy Krueger movie, even after she got hired

Kat Conner Sterling thought that Five Nights at Freddy’s was a Freddy Kruegger movie, and couldn’t understand why fans kept sending her bear emojis

Three of the animatronic creatures from Five Nights at Freddy's — Image credit: Blumhouse Productions

News by Joshua Lapin-Bertone, Contributing writer

Published on Fri Jan 02 2026

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If you’re in a horror movie, avoid anyone named Freddy. You could be dealing with a killer that enters dreams, or a homicidal animatronic bear. Either way, the horror film genre has produced a few scary villains named Freddy.

Kat Conner Sterling, who played Max in the 2023 Five Nights at Freddy’s film, was aware of Freddy Kruegger, but not Freddy Fazbear. This created some confusion when she was cast for the movie.

“I was not [familiar with the games]. I auditioned for the movie back in, I think it was like December of 2022,” Kat Conner Sterling says during a FNAF spotlight panel at Animate x Nightmare Weekend Richmond 2025. “As actors we get a lot of auditions. And I saw Five Nights at Freddy’s, and I assumed it was a Freddy Krueger film. And I was like, ‘This is great.’ And so, I booked it, still thinking it was a Freddy Krueger film.”

Before long, she had some clues that this wasn’t another entry in the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. “My casting got leaked online, so people starting commenting bear emojis on my Instagram, and I didn’t know what that meant. It really wasn’t until I got on set that I saw the giant animatronics and I was like, ‘I think I may have been wrong.’ I was confused. I’m still waiting on my Freddy Krueger film.”

Honestly, this entire mix-up has given me a killer idea for a crossover.

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Joshua Lapin-Bertone: Joshua is a pop culture writer specializing in comic book media. His work has appeared on the official DC Comics website, the DC Universe subscription service, HBO Max promotional videos, the Batman Universe fansite, and more. In between traveling around the country to cover various comic conventions, Joshua resides in Florida where he binges superhero television and reads obscure comics from yesteryear.