The Scream actress plays Laura Sobiech in the Disney+ movie Clouds, about singer-songwriter Zach Sobiech, who topped the iTunes charts after he died from a rare bone cancer at the age of 18.
His song of the same name was a viral hit in 2013, after he learned that the osteosarcoma he had been diagnosed with had spread.
His mother Laura documented how he spent the rest of his short life pursuing his musical dreams in her memoir Fly A Little Higher, which has now been adapted into a film.
Campbell, who is the mother of two sons, told the PA news agency: “I read the book before I met Laura and I was just so blown away by this woman’s strength, spirituality, maturity, courage.
“It’s unfathomable to put yourself in the place of a mother losing her child, it’s even more unfathomable that someone could do it with such grace and bolster her family along the journey, including her son Zach.
“I wanted to honour her, I wanted to honour that woman and her strength. It’s a big ask but she was so open.
“It’s very brave to allow people to tell your story, it must be very very surreal for them, but she wrote me the other day and said it continues to be very surreal but they are so happy.”
She added: “I was really lucky when I met her, our energies are very similar so that made it easy and we ended up having a great friendship.
“We can learn from someone when their message and their son’s message was to live live to the fullest and to go into death with courage and positivity and one of the most profound things she said to me was that her relationship with Zach has not ended, if anything it has become stronger, since his passing.
“And that blew my mind, because she ruminates on it and she gets to know him better and she gets to know herself better and we don’t often think of death in that way, we think of it as a finale, and it was wonderful to hear from her that that’s not necessarily how it has to be.”
Clouds is out now on Disney+.
