Maika Monroe is well known within the horror sphere thanks to her starring roles in movies like It Follows and Longlegs. Now, with Victorian Psycho, the genre icon is back, and this time she's bringing one insane performance.
Victorian Psycho follows Monroe's Winifred Notty, an eccentric 19th-century governess who comes to the Ensor House in 1858 to care for the children of the Pounds family (led by Jason Isaacs' Mr. Pounds and Ruth Wilson's Mrs. Pounds). Little does everyone in the house know that Winifred is secretly an unhinged psychopath, harboring a darkness she calls Fred.
Ahead of its November 13 release date, Victorian Psycho premiered at Fantastic Fest, where The Direct caught up with director Zachary Wigon to discuss Maika Monroe's intense performance and the film's connection to the recently published book of the same name.
For more of The Direct's coverage from Fantastic Fest, be sure to check out our interviews with the cast and director of Beware Bouina.
Maika Monroe Becomes a True Psychopath in Victorian Psycho
"We Talked a Lot About Serial Killers In Real Life"
- The Direct: "Maika Monroe really takes this role of Winifred and just runs with it. She's great. She's amazing. What's the core direction you imparted on her that kind of guided that unhinged performance?"
Zachary Wigon: We talked a lot about certain reference points in other movies. We talked a lot about serial killers in real life. I sent her a video. Actually, it was interesting. There was this video that a forensic psychologist had done, where he it was an interview with Ted Bundy, but then the forensic psychologist would sort of stop the interview every 15 or 30 seconds or whatever, and he would point out how something that Bundy was doing with his his physiology, his, you know, facial expression or body language or whatever was telling you something very different than what his words were saying.
Wigon and Monroe also spoke about rooting the performance in reality while also being "larger than reality:"
Wigon: And we talked about that a lot, and I think that was maybe helpful to Maika. We talked about the idea of it feeling rooted in reality, but also larger than reality. And at one point, I said to her, 'This is essentially an alien in a human body. That's basically who you're playing.' And so we talked about that a lot in prep. But really, it's like, as they say, when you cast an actor, 80% of directing the actor is casting the right actor, and Maika was the right actor for this role.
- The Direct: "Can you recall any specific elements of her performance, or what she brought to the character, that was very much her own brainchild, that she brought to the table [where] you were like, 'oh, that's awesome?'"
Wigon: On the practical front, she wears prosthetic teeth in the film, and that was one of Maika's first ideas to have the prosthetic teeth, which I think gave her a sense of this character being outside herself, and maybe enabled her to get outside herself in a certain way to embody the role...
"Everything that she did was exactly what I was hoping for," the director said, adding that she did things in ways he could never have pictured himself:
Wigon: Everything that she did was a surprise to me. Everything that she did was exactly what I was hoping for, but in a way that I never could have pictured it. That's the beauty of working with a really great actor. You are essentially in prep, guiding them to a takeoff point, but then once they hit the takeoff point, it's like they are going to have to do it from there, and you're hoping that they're going to surprise you, but surprise you in order to give you what you were hoping for, and that's what she did with the film.
The Direct's full conversation with Victorian Psycho director Zachary Wigon can be seen below:
