Between “Get Out,” my personal favorite “The Perfection,” and now “M3GAN,” what is drawing you back to horror over and over again?
I think I must be dark in some way that I don’t understand [laughs]. I think the true answer is that all of those movies have a couple of things in common. They all engage with a subject matter that is real and serious, and something that people talk about with a lot of weight that kind of lifts it into a genre that can have a little bit more fun with it. Which sounds messed up when you’re talking about things like sexual assault, and race, and loss, and trauma. But this genre has a way of taking those subjects and kind of messing with the way we usually talk about them and loosening up the area with which we can engage with it.
Oh, totally.
Which I love, because I think that sometimes, as Jordan [Peele] used to say a lot when we were promoting “Get Out,” the way we talk about race is broken and we needed new language for things to be able to make the conversation more meaningful, deeper, revive it for this new generation that doesn’t know how to talk about it. So that’s one thing.
The other thing is that the women in these movies, these women that I’ve played, are just cool. And I read these scripts and I engage with the characters that I’m being asked to read for. And so often they don’t have time in the thematic world of the movie or in the story to become meaty and three-dimensional and someone I feel existed before the movie and continues to exist after, let alone someone I feel like I know. So that combination, plus the fact that filmmakers really get to just make what they imagine in this world, they get to let their genre freak flags fly, and these movies live lives that are very specific and very much lived in the spirit of the filmmaker. I just find that experience to be thrilling. So I think that’s a very long-winded answer.