The Real Reason The Conjuring: Last Rites Kept the Farmiga Sisters Apart
Fans begged for a Farmiga family team-up, but The Conjuring: Last Rites never delivered. Inside the decision that kept Vera and Taissa playing strangers in the same haunted universe.
Two Farmigas, one haunted universe. Vera Farmiga has anchored The Conjuring movies as Lorraine Warren. Her sister, Taissa Farmiga, has headlined The Nun films as Sister Irene decades earlier in the timeline. Fans have been waiting for the franchise to officially connect them. The Nun II even tossed in a blink-and-you-miss-it nod suggesting a shared bloodline. But The Conjuring: Last Rites, the series' final (for now) chapter, does not unite them — and that was a deliberate choice.
The crossover that almost was
Director Michael Chaves — who made The Nun II and returned for Last Rites — told THR they actively decided not to bring Sister Irene into the new movie. He said they took the lineage tease in The Nun II as far as they could without crowding out the core story. Last Rites is built around Ed and Lorraine Warren and their relationship with their daughter, Judy. Layering in a long-lost relative on top of that, plus dealing with a roughly 25-year age gap between Irene and the Warrens once you line up the timelines, would have turned the movie into a maze of exposition. In his words, that thread would have ballooned into something too big and too sprawling.
About that wedding cameo rumor
You might have heard whispers that an aged-up Taissa Farmiga would pop up in the Last Rites wedding sequence. That scene does include several franchise cameos, but Chaves says the Irene rumor was just that — a rumor. He did text Taissa with a cheeky idea to slip her into the wedding for a quick blink-and-go moment and just hand-wave the age math. She was already on another shoot, so it never happened.
No 'all demons, assemble' finale
There was also chatter early on about turning Last Rites into a mega-crossover that unleashed every entity the Warrens have caged across the series. Chaves nixed that approach and steered the film in the opposite direction.
"One of the references I kept giving was Logan. I loved how Logan wasn’t this big, sprawling movie where every villain is unleashed on Wolverine. It’s the smallest, most intimate Wolverine story — and because of that, it hits big emotionally."
He even watched fan-cut trailers that imagined a Ghostbusters-style roundup of every Conjuring demon and thought they looked cool, but he was relieved that wasn’t the movie he was making. In his view, cramming in the entire genealogy of baddies and Lorraine’s various connections would make for a lot of noise and, ultimately, a hollow experience.
Where to watch
The Conjuring: Last Rites is available now on Digital. The 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray, and DVD release lands November 25.