Garrett Wareing and Amanda Fix Will Play Young Ed and Lorraine Warren in The Conjuring: First Communion

New Line and Warner Bros. have found the actors who will carry The Conjuring Universe backward in time. Garrett Wareing and Amanda Fix have been cast as younger versions of Ed and Lorraine Warren in The Conjuring: First Communion, the prequel set to arrive in theaters on September 10, 2027. Dread Central broke the casting news first, and outlets including Deadline, Variety, Bloody Disgusting, TheWrap, JoBlo, and Gizmodo quickly confirmed and expanded on the report, with several noting that production is already underway.

Wareing, a series regular on Netflix’s Ransom Canyon, which opened at number one in the U.S. and has already been renewed for a second season, steps into the role of a young Ed Warren. His resume also includes Lionsgate’s The Long Walk, an ensemble that picked up the Robert Altman Award at this year’s Film Independent Spirit Awards, along with the Sundance title Chasing Summer and earlier work on Manifest and Pretty Little Liars: The Perfectionists. Fix, cast as the young Lorraine, currently appears in the Duffer Brothers’ Netflix series Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen and recently premiered Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma at Cannes. Her other credits include Daisy Jones & the Six, North of Normal, Orphan Black: Echoes, and a recurring role as Maya in the Amazon Freevee series High School.

The casting carries a small wrinkle that a few outlets flagged right away. Younger versions of Ed and Lorraine already appeared on screen last year, played by Orion Smith and Madison Lawlor in flashback scenes throughout The Conjuring: Last Rites. That means First Communion is moving forward with an entirely new pair rather than carrying those actors into a full prequel, a choice that suggests the studio wants faces attached specifically to this chapter of the story.

Plot details are being kept under wraps, though the title alone points toward the kind of Catholic horror setting the franchise has leaned on since the beginning, likely centered on a haunting connected to a child’s first communion. Rodrigue Huart is directing, making the jump to a franchise tentpole after being hired off the strength of a short film. Richard Naing and Ian Goldberg, the writing team behind The Nun II and last year’s The Conjuring: Last Rites, wrote the screenplay. Peter Safran is producing through The Safran Company alongside James Wan, with John Rickard, Natalia Safran, and Romel Adam executive producing, keeping the film in the hands of the team that built the universe in the first place.

It remains unclear whether Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga will appear in any capacity as the adult Warrens, though the reporting so far suggests First Communion will center on the younger pair rather than treat the veterans as a framing device. That uncertainty lands at an interesting moment for the franchise. The Conjuring: Last Rites was marketed as a send off for Wilson and Farmiga’s version of the characters, right down to a finale coded ending. Instead, it opened bigger than any horror movie in history and pushed its worldwide total past 480 million dollars, numbers that made a second look at these characters, young or old, feel inevitable. With more than 2.7 billion dollars earned across nine films, The Conjuring Universe remains the highest grossing horror franchise ever assembled, and New Line has now cleared a billion dollars worldwide from horror releases in a single year on two separate occasions, in 2017 and again in 2025.

Casting news is typically the first real proof that a rumored project is moving, and with Wareing and Fix now attached and cameras already rolling, First Communion has crossed that line. Whether the film ends up functioning as a true prequel or something closer to an origin story for the Warrens’ entire career, audiences will get their first real look at these two actors carrying the franchise well before its September 2027 release date.