“Here I am playing this ethereal non-human being in ‘Usher,’ and my biggest task was to saddle her with a humanity,” declares Carla Gugino about portraying a mysterious angel of death in Mike Flanagan‘s latest horror limited series “The Fall of the House of Usher.” For our recent webchat she adds, “It was cool to juxtapose between this raven perched on a branch watching humanity and all of their foibles, and also because I was able to play these seven different incarnations of this character, each one of those incarnations really needed to be fully human.” Watch our exclusive video interview above.
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“The Fall of the House of Usher” was created by horror maestro Flanagan, based on various works and characters by 19th-century author Edgar Allan Poe, adapted into a single nonlinear narrative set from 1953 to 2023. The gothic horror drama recounts the rise and fall of wealthy big-pharma magnate Roderick Usher and his ruthless COO sister Madeline Usher, and the events leading to the grisly deaths of all six of Roderick’s adult children. The eight-episode limited series features many of Flanagan’s previous collaborators (in what is affectionately known as the “Flanaverse,” in series including Netflix stablemates “The Haunting of Hill House,” “The Haunting of Bly Manor” and “Midnight Mass”), led by Gugino who stars as the mysterious Verna, smugly preying upon the Ushers, Bruce Greenwood as an older Roderick and two-time Oscar nominee Mary McDonnell as an older Madeline, as well as Henry Thomas, Rahul Kohli, Kate Siegel, T’Nia Miller, Carl Lumbly and Mark Hamill.
Gugino admits that she was excited and nervous about taking on a complex character like Verna, especially because of all of the physical forms in which she manifests throughout the series, and the often grisly murders that punctuate each episode. “Horror allows you to explore as an actor these deeper themes and anxieties and preoccupations. Once you’ve delivered on the uncanny and the scary elements, you can be as smart as you want to be. So, I’m seeing this and I’m going, ‘oh wow, he’s talking about accountability. He’s talking about hubris. He’s talking about fate. He’s talking about Karma,’ all of these things that are so interesting. And then about seven episodes in, it dawned on me: ‘Oh right, I’m playing this, I have to pull it off. What if I fail and I don’t do justice to what he’s written? So, I would say that initially there was great excitement. Then came terror,” she smiles. “Acting is the love of my life, so in that way, the terror; there is a familiar feeling in which it turns into, ‘let me focus on what I actually need to do to calibrate this character,'” she explains, referring to the big reveal in each episode as Verna (an intentional anagram of “raven”) appears as a bespoke angel of death as she kills off each of the Ushers. “In this case that was extremely challenging, because there were so many.”
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