Melissa McCarthy Teases the 'Ghostbusters' Reboot on Howard Stern

Melissa McCarthy earlier this year (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File)

Melissa McCarthy ain’t afraid of no ghosts. During her appearance this morning on SiriusXM’s The Howard Stern Show, McCarthy shared her excitement about starring in Paul Feig’s all-female Ghostbusters film –— which, she emphasized, will not be a remake.

“Paul is doing a full reboot of it. I think we all love the original so much it’s like, don’t try to re-do it. You’re never going to touch that,” McCarthy told Stern. (Listen to the clip here.) “So it’s definitely more modern. Paul has said that he really wants it to be a little scarier.”

With Feig at the helm — who directed McCarthy in Bridesmaids, The Heat, and her June 5 film Spy — the actress says she has no fears about tackling such an iconic property. “He’s got a really great gut for that stuff,” she says of Feig. “Anybody else I’d be like, is this a good idea?… But not with him. I know he’ll make it right.”

Related: All Four New ‘Ghostbusters’ Stars Hung Out at the ‘SNL’ Afterparty

Announced in October, the new Ghostbusters reboot will star a dream team of comic actresses, including McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, and Saturday Night Live’s Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones. Feig has kept mum on plot details, but recently opened up to French film website Allocine about his reasons for taking on the project.

“I had been contacted several times about doing a sequel for Ghostbusters and I just kept turning it down because I didn’t know how to do it,” he said (via Slashfilm). “The scripts had been written, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it. I wasn’t excited about it. So finally, one day I was like, ‘It’s a great franchise and it’s a great idea, if I was going to do it, how would I do it?’ And then I thought, ‘If I could put four women in the lead roles, that’s exciting to me.’ That I know how to do, and I know how to make that funny. And there’s so many funny women I’ve been dying to work with.”

Feig was adamant that he wanted to re-form the Ghostbusters from the ground up, rather than create a sequel to the original films. “The old movies are so good, I didn’t want to mess with them. And I also want to see the beginnings of this group,” he said. “I want to see people seeing ghosts for the first time, and how they’re going to fight them for the first time, how they develop their technology.” (Watch the interview below.)

That’s about all McCarthy and Feig have been willing to say about Ghostbusters during their promotional tour for Spy. When another reporter begged McCarthy for plot details (see video below), she responded, “There will be ghosts, and we will be busting them.”

Ghostbusters begins shooting this summer and opens in theaters next July.