Carrie-Anne Moss stars as Mae in Die Alone, a new zombie-adjacent horror movie in which her survivalist character looks after the movie's main star, Douglas Smith's Ethan, who is suffering from amnesia.
Ethan, just waking up from a car crash, is desperately seeking to find his girlfriend Emma as he is thrust into a post-apocalyptic world he doesn't recognize.
Carrie-Anne Moss Talks About Her Positive Experiences on Die Alone
While talking exclusively with The Direct's Russ Milheim, Die Alone star Carrie-Anne Moss discussed her latest film and how it compares to other zombie movies.
When asked how this film stands out from the other entries in the zombie genre, the actress admitted that she's "not an expert on that" but did praise Die Alone for being "so unique and different:"
"Well, I have to say I'm not an expert on that. In fact, if anything, you know, reading scripts like this, if they're like [in the] zombie genre, I'd kind of veer away from them. I mean, I did do a zombie movie a while ago. It was so unique and different as well. And this one was so unique and different. I love the story. I love the character."
For Moss, the theme of Die Alone was one of its strongest elements:
"I love this theme of what would you do for love, basically, with all these other crazy things happening around it. But ultimately, I have to say that I wanted to do this part because I really love the character of Mae, and I wanted to try that and be in that. So that's why I said yes to it."
Many moments in Die Alone feature the plot device of amnesia, which will remind many of Christopher Nolan's classic Memento movie––Carrie-Anne Moss also happened to star in that very movie as Natalie, a bartender who gets sucked into the story's big mystery.
Her time on Memento is actually "the only thing that made me hesitate doing the part," Moss admitted:
"Oh, I mean, every job informs me because it's my life. But I have to say that when I first read the script, that was the only thing that made me hesitate doing the part were those few moments where I felt a little similarity with 'Memento.' I'm kind of a stickler on things like that. Like I was just like, 'Oh, I don't know,' a couple of times when I was reading it. And then, when I looked at the whole story, it was so different that I was able to sort of put that aside and not let it block me from saying yes to doing it."
She went on to reminisce about her time on Memento and how her time on Die Alone gave her similarly positive experiences:
"So I mean, I had such a wonderful experience on 'Memento.' It was pretty early in my career. It was a transformative experience because I learned what it felt like to feel very free in the work. Christopher Nolan creates this very an environment for a lot of personal freedom. And I thrive in that kind of environment. And I felt that with ['Die Alone'] as well, that [director Dean Lowell] really gave all of us the room to bring the characters to life in our way. So that was really, really special."
Moss was then asked if there was any particular moment with her performance that she was most proud of, the actress didn't have any one scene but rather went into how she tends to evaluate herself through the process:
"I'm pretty, like, I'm not tough on myself, and I'm not easy on myself. I just try to watch it and ask myself, was I able to tell the truth. How many moments did I not? And you know, that's kind of how I look at it. And I was pretty happy with the way this all turned out."
She then talked about how heartwarming it was to see that, during the production of the movie, there were "a lot of first a second-generation people in roles in the crew" passing down their experiences to one another:
"I think what tickled me or what I really loved was that during the shooting of it, there were a lot of first and second-generation people in roles in the crew. So you'd have like someone who'd been in the business a long time, and, say, their son and teaching them the trade. And there was quite a bit of that going on, whether or not they were related, or they were friends, or, like, everybody knew everybody because it was such a small town. Everybody knew everybody. But it was really inspiring to watch the older generation passing the wisdom down. And that surprised me how happy that made me feel."
The whole interview can be seen here:
Die Alone is now available to buy and rent digitally.
