Willa Fitzgerald Is Revelatory in the Serial-Killer Thriller ‘Strange Darling.’ Is It Too Scary for Awards?

This article contains spoilers about the twists and ending of Strange Darling.

Strange Darling, a gritty serial-killer thriller shot on 35-mm film, is framed as the story of a notorious murderer’s final crimes. It opens on a classic, stark final-girl shot: a helpless, bloodied, hysterical woman (Willa Fitzgerald) lost in the Oregon woods, seeking refuge from a guy (Kyle Gallner) who’s coming after her with a shotgun. The film’s six chapters, presented out of order, reveal what got them here—and what comes next.

The main reveal in a movie full of them—and consider this your final spoiler warning—is that the woman in peril is actually the notorious serial killer, known around town as the Electric Lady—and she’s accidentally settled on a cop as her next victim. So ensues the violent cat-and-mouse game. This pushes writer-director JT Mollner’s story into several unexpected places: a stop-in on the bizarre, artery-clogging breakfast ritual of a mountain couple played by Barbara Hershey and Ed Begley Jr; an ear getting blown off; a BDSM encounter gone wildly wrong.

Until recently, Fitzgerald was best known for leading teen drama series like MTV’s Scream and USA’s Dare Me. But the Yale grad completely reintroduces herself here, a year after her tour de force performance in The Fall of the House of Usher. In Strange Darling, she’s both terrifying and terrified, demented and increasingly, poignantly tragic. It’s the kind of big, go-for-broke, utterly unvarnished performance that awards bodies typically love—unless, of course, that performance is in a genre film. (Just ask Hereditary’s Toni Collette or Us’s Lupita Nyong’o.) And Strange Darling is nothing if not a slick, brutally efficient exercise in American horror.

The film, which was shot by Giovanni Ribisi in his feature DP debut, is available for digital rental today following a modestly successful box office run. “There have been only a few projects in my life where I’ve felt so connected to it from the moment that I’ve read it, and I haven’t gotten most of those jobs,” Fitzgerald tells Vanity Fair about her Strange Darling ride. “As a rule, I’m very diligent about not allowing myself to project into the future of what a final product of a role could be, because I inherently don’t really trust any of that.” This is one case where she’s allowing herself to enjoy it.

Vanity Fair: As you say, you haven’t often been given opportunities like this. Does that get frustrating?

Willa Fitzgerald: I’ve been doing this for over a decade at this point, which is wild and amazing to even get to say—because that in and of itself is such a privilege. I think a real reckoning that an actor has in that period of time is just the reality that the majority of things you ever audition for will never be your job. It’s this real learned skill of holding lightly and caring deeply about these characters that come across your desk. Then once in a decade, you really get to have that opportunity and just fucking go with it.

The Fall of the House of Usher seems like one of those too.

Yes, that also, absolutely. And I shot both of those in the same year!

Both are performances in the kind of genre projects that, for whatever reason, tend to be harder to get into the awards conversation, no matter how well they’re received. You got a Critics Choice nomination for Usher, and are getting the word out now for Strange Darling. How have you observed that dynamic?

As an outside observer, that certainly has been what I’ve seen. I don’t really know why it is that genre movies tend to sort of be overlooked, in terms of critical awards and acclaim, but at least as an audience member, some of the movies that I respond to the most—and have the most visceral, emotional catharsis or engagement with—are movies in the genre world. Maybe because they offer some sort of emotional release that is really apparent: The way that they function is to make you feel scared or grossed out or tense.

Part of the reason why I love acting in genre things is, as an actor, when you aren’t confined to a strict box of realism, you get such a huge playground to play in. That is so exciting. It’s not a surreal movie that we’ve made, Strange Darling—it’s really grounded in a fundamental truthfulness. But with that little bit of extra room, you get to fly.

When you approach a role like Strange Darling, does it change the way you prepare?

Because she is such an intense character on so many different levels, the thing I was most concerned with from the beginning was making sure that the way I constructed her journey worked chronologically, and came from a horrible truth of who she was and what she had experienced.

Is there an element of wanting to have some fun with it too? The film is a subversion of the final-girl/serial-killer story—but it also is still that. And in the last act, you get to run wild.

I mean, yes. [Laughs] I will say, every step was so hard and so fun. What’s been really interesting about watching the movie as opposed to being in the movie is, even in those fun big moments, it’s so sad and so horrible at the same time. Who the Lady becomes by the end of the movie is a desperate animal seeking survival, and desperately devastated at where she’s ended up. JT was a great director in those moments too, because he was great at reminding me that she has become the thing that she has been called—the Electric Lady. She’s like, “You wanted me to be this thing? I’ve become this thing, so here you go—have it.” That was fun.

Let’s talk about how it starts. You’re hiding in a standing freezer. You get caught, after your ear was blown off. We get a lot of blood and screaming. Walk me through the logistics of filming that sequence.

It’s a huge gift, honestly, to have that many things immediately present for the character—like, it’s confirming the truth that having rules helps you succeed. I knew that there were certain limitations: I was chained to the freezer, I had an ear that didn’t function and probably had a ruptured eardrum. I was incredibly low on blood supply. Being stuck in the icebox was some of the first stuff we shot—day six of shooting or something—which is horrifying when you first see that on the schedule, because you are at the beginning of your journey but having to play scenes that are very far along. I remember being really nervous the day before we went to shoot that.

It’s a very long scene, and we were shooting on film, so an additional crazy part of shooting that scene was, we would get halfway through and our [camera magazine] would roll out. Then we would have to start back from the beginning of the scene and go to where we had run out of the mag and pick it back up. We did that for the entirety of shooting that scene because we just didn’t have any mags that were long enough. But I think it all feeds into the final product—the summation of its parts is what you end up seeing.

I cannot imagine filming that scene like that.

There were so many days on set like that, where something happens that is just out of your control and it’s going to make everything harder. You have the option of either being frustrated by that reality or surrendering to that reality. It’s when you get frustrated that things go wrong, and when you surrender to it, that magic can happen. I feel like we luckily got the magic.

I’m curious about the hair and makeup, and how that factored in given you’re making a small-budget indie. Did you worry you were racing against the clock as the team was trying to get her look and her physical disintegration right?

You’re so spot-on. JT told me very early on that he wanted to bleach all of my hair, and I was obviously concerned. [Laughs] It takes a little bit of time to grow out bleached hair! But also, I did really trust him, and I believed in this project so deeply that I bleached all of my hair. Then I got to Oregon and JT was like, “I want to cut it off, and I want to give you an insane haircut and bangs.” I was like, “Okay…” We did half of the haircut one day, and I was like, “We’ve got to stop. This is too much, too fast.” But I called JT the next morning like, “You’re right, we’ve got to go all the way and I’m fully in.” And he was like, “Great, amazing.”

I’ve never altered my appearance so radically for anything I’ve done. Especially for a character like the Lady, which is so unique and so physical. Getting to look in the mirror every day and see the Lady staring back at me as I was doing this job was so helpful. I told JT this many times; I’m very grateful that he pushed and pushed and got me to trust him in that way, because it was such a good call.

Allyson Riggs

Did you study serial killers?

No, I didn’t, because I don’t think of her as a serial killer. That may sound funny, but no, I didn’t find that framework at all helpful. I thought of her as a deeply wounded person with an incredible need that is continually being thwarted, and a journey that eventually takes her to the understanding that she is the one thwarting herself. There were definitely movies that JT and I talked about as more just visual references, like Repulsion and Bug, and a movie that I loved, which I did revisit before I started working on this project: Monster.

I thought of Charlize Theron in that movie a lot while watching this.

I guess she is kind of a serial killer. [Laughs] But I also don’t really think of her as a serial killer either. I was so amazed by her performance when I saw it for the first time, and she took such a license in that movie to transform in so many ways. It was a nice thing to revisit as a way of giving myself permission to transform.

You’ve watched the movie with audiences lately. What has that been like, especially since you are so unrecognizable here?

There are so many things I’ve done that I’ve never watched, but I so weirdly love watching this movie, and I don’t know how or why. It’s also a very intense experience for me. When I watch it, I tend to feel quite similar to how I felt while shooting the scenes. The premiere in particular was an amazing audience to sit and watch the movie with, because they were so present in a tangible way.

What do you make of the reactions to the movie so far, particularly within the industry? There’s been a lot of talk around your performance.

It feels really humbling, which is a word I don’t really like to use, but I actually think is appropriate in this situation. I’m just very affected by that because it has been a lot of years of just being a working actor—which I absolutely love. But to then have people actually watching me in something? [Laughs] It’s amazing.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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