Emily Alyn Lind

Emily Alyn Lind (born May 6, 2002, in Brooklyn, New York) is an American actress who began her career as a child performer. She is the daughter of producer and assistant director John Lind and actress Barbara Alyn Woods, and the sister of fellow actresses Natalie Alyn Lind and Alyvia Alyn Lind. She made her screen debut at age five, playing a younger version of Dakota Fanning's character in The Secret Life of Bees (2008).

She became known to young audiences through her recurring role as young Amanda Clarke in the ABC series Revenge, and for her role as Ariel in the CBS medical drama Code Black. Her film credits include The Babysitter (2017) and The Babysitter: Killer Queen (2020), both Netflix originals, and Doctor Sleep (2019), the sequel to The Shining, where she played Snakebite Andi. From 2021 to 2023, she starred as Audrey Hope in the HBO Max teen drama Gossip Girl.

In Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024), Lind portrayed Melody, the ghost of a sixteen-year-old girl who died in a tenement fire near Washington Square Park after lighting the last match in a Melody Diner matchbook. Melody haunts Washington Square Park, appearing at a chess table to befriend Phoebe Spengler, and the two develop an unlikely friendship rooted in Phoebe's outsider loneliness and Melody's longing for unfinished business. Director Gil Kenan gave Lind the 1946 Italian film Sylvie and the Ghost as preparation, and Lind did not learn her character was a ghost until filming began, having become suspicious when reading a line in which Melody says "Oh, don't worry." The Phoebe-and-Melody scenes were filmed in three versions: both actors together, Phoebe alone, and Melody alone; the takes with both actresses were most often selected, and the visual effects team then rotoscoped Melody out, cleaned the backgrounds, and reinserted a finished digital Melody. An early plan to keep the character perpetually floating via a parallelogram rig was abandoned in favour of a grounded, human-feeling performance. Lind did not use motion capture equipment, and she did not see the completed version of the character until recording ADR, as Kenan wanted her performance to feel more human than ghostly. She initially wore a short, blunt-cut red wig for a week of filming, but those scenes were scrapped and reshot. On-set, Melody's on-screen chess moves were achieved with cables and radio-controlled servos. The character's visible flames were created by coating a dummy in a mixture of brandy and hand sanitizer, igniting it, and superimposing the result onto Lind in post-production. Melody's dress was inspired by actress Lillian Gish's iconic period costumes. The moment where Melody descends through the Firehouse fire pole was a direct homage to Sylvie and the Ghost. Although depicted as Washington Square Park, the chess-playing scenes were filmed at Russell Square Park in London.