Finally, Maika Monroe Gets to Play the Psychopath

Maika Monroe has spent much of her career stalked by male psychopaths: Nicolas Cage in Longlegs, the sex demon from It Follows, the serial killer across the street in Watcher. It’s only appropriate that she’s finally getting the chance to go batshit in her own right. In Victorian Psycho, premiering this week in Cannes’s “Un Certain Regard” section, Monroe is Winifred Notty, a new governess who arrives at a gothic manor in 1858 to educate two young children (Hamnet’s Jacobi Jupe and Wednesday’s Evie Templeton). Winifred is chipper and highly motivated to succeed, at first easing her way into the good graces of the manor’s master (Jason Isaacs) and his wife (Ruth Wilson), until it soon becomes clear that she is utterly deranged — though, it must be said, very proudly so.

Victorian Psycho is based on the novel of the same name from Virginia Feito, who also wrote the script, and directed by Zachary Wigon, the man behind Sanctuary. It’s campy and high energy, and a new tonal direction for Monroe, who says she channeled Jack Nicholson and Ted Bundy for the performance, which sees her swallowing human ears, chopping manor staff into bits and feeding them to pigs, and murdering babies. The day before its Cannes premiere, I sat down with her and Wigon to talk about premiering It Follows here in 2015, shooting the film in a haunted castle, and watching YouTube clips of serial-killer interviews.

Maika, I was just looking at old Getty photos of you from when you premiered It Follows here in 2015.
Maika Monroe: Oh, God. I also have looked at those photos. It’s really something. I bought myself an Anthropologie skirt … It’s not good. But I loved it. It was a time.

What do you remember about that time?
Monroe: It was very surreal. We made It Follows for no money at all. David Robert Mitchell had just done one tiny movie for, like, $100,000.

Zachary Wigon: So good. The Myth of the American Sleepover. I love that movie.

Monroe: So good. I was at the start of my career, and I never thought, doing this tiny horror indie film, that it would ever premiere at Cannes. I’ll never forget it.

Have you shot They Follow yet?
Monroe: No, we go in two months. I’m so excited.

Is Jay okay?
Monroe: She’s … she’s doing well. That’s as much as I can say. She is there and she’s doing well.

Zachary, this is your first time here?
Wigon: Yeah, and it’s profoundly surreal, because like many people, I track this film festival every year. It’s a big event for me when the lineup gets announced. Who’s in, what’s playing. You read the reviews, you look at the photo-call images. I’ve wanted to make movies since I was 11 years old. This, in the middle of May, has been a part of my annual routine my entire adult life and then some.

What do you both make of the fact that this is one of the only Hollywood and American films here? Cate Blanchett said yesterday she saw it as partly proof of the industry being risk-averse. Do you feel that way from within it?
Monroe: Yes and no. I feel really lucky with this particular project. And some of the other projects I’ve just done and am going to do. But, yeah, there’s a lot of very blah things that you’re sent and are getting made, and you’re like, Why? I hope that isn’t always the case.

Wigon: When I think about it, I feel very fortunate that Anton, the studio behind this movie, was willing to take a chance on it. But for me, what I’ve found for getting projects off the ground, for this and Sanctuary, is that if you’re sort of touching genre, you can get some leeway to make things that are more interesting.

What was your reaction upon getting this script, Maika? 

Monroe: We read a lot of scripts as actors. This was a breath of fresh air. And also I knew that this role would be incredibly challenging for me. Something really scared me about the role as well.

What scared you?
Monroe: I’ve never done a role like this before. A lot of times, the roles are much more internal, quiet, subdued. This was the opposite of that. It’s very big. I wanted to keep things grounded but needed to be able to push it to the absolute limits and beyond. I’ve never done that in a role before. So there was fear. Now, looking back, we did so many rehearsals, which was really amazing, so by the time we were on set, I was so comfortable with her. But figuring out the physicality, the facial expressions — it was really different for me. Adding in the British accents, the period.

Wigon: Working with babies, working with animals.

Monroe: It will definitely be the character I miss the most. I’ve never had so much fun or so much freedom.

Zachary, what was the Maika movie you’d seen her in that made you cast her here?
Wigon: It’s funny, talking about It Follows — It Follows and Longlegs are probably my two favorite post-Cure horror movies.

Monroe: Cure is so good.

Wigon: But there were a couple of things. Maika has this really intense internal quality about her, where you’re really curious about what’s going on in her head. She’s very adept at conveying the sense of the gears whirring in someone’s head. There’s something going on behind her eyes, and you don’t know what it is, but you’re interested to find out. And I thought that would be perfect for a serial killer; we’re always so curious about what they’re thinking in nonfiction. And I’d read that she’s a big Jack Nicholson fan, which was perfect, because we’re doing our Jack Torrance with this.

And I read in the press notes that you were watching clips of Ted Bundy for this? Which specifically?
Monroe: Yes! Wait, was it Ted?

Wigon: Yeah, it was this clip where a forensic psychologist would pause the interview every 20 seconds to say: “The way his lip twitched when he said that, he’s saying this but really thinking that …” He was analyzing every tic and gesture.

Monroe: I’ll never forget the video you sent where he’s in prison and somebody asks him a question, something simple like, “Who are you?” And you see this range of emotions go across his face. Laughing, making an angry face. It was nuts. I was like, “That’s it!”

Wigon: It was like a machine calibrating an animal. Or an alien. One of the things we talked about is that Winifred is almost like an alien inside a human body.

Was getting in that Bundy-like headspace every day difficult? Did it fuck with you at all?
Monroe: It was a wild ride. But it was so much fun. Because of all of the prep we did, I just felt this immense freedom to go for it. I don’t think I’ve ever really had that on a set or in a role.

What draws you back to horror again and again?
Monroe: I think there’s something really intriguing about the genre. In the past 10 to 15 years, there’s been a real renaissance with these incredible filmmakers who are coming to the space because there’s so much freedom in it. You can really push the boundaries. I feel so lucky to be a part of the period of It Follows and The Witch and The Babadook — the new age of horror with an elegance to it, the soundtrack and the shots, all of it is very beautiful. They’re the most interesting roles I read, and with the most interesting filmmakers.

Do we need more women psychopaths in the pantheon?
Wigon: I think, for me, what was fascinating about the character was, if you think about the repression of Victorian England, it was particularly repressive toward women. One of the things Virginia and I spoke about were the very insane beliefs that they had — women weren’t supposed to exercise because their uterus might fall out. It was interesting to think about the idea of repression and the connection between repression and madness. There’s something very intense about not letting people engage with who and what they are.

Monroe: It’s such an intriguing mind-set — certain emotions just aren’t there for them. Like fear. So there was such a freedom to really do anything. I was like, I need to do this. Which I don’t always feel with roles.

You have some great scenes where you’re tormenting young Hamnet. How do you calibrate your performance so you’re not actually scaring the kids?
Monroe: Jacobi is a 45-year-old man. How old was he when we were filming? Eleven? We were all in our little waiting-room area in between takes, and he was writing a novel. It was actually his fifth novel.

Actually a novel?
Monroe: They’re in notebooks, but yes. His fifth. So he doesn’t feel like a child. It’s like talking to an adult.

Wigon: He’s extremely thoughtful. He had questions. There’s a scene in the classroom where he asks Winifred, “Why do people stray from God’s appointment?” And he said to me, “Why does he ask that question?” And I said, “He’s curious. He’s genuinely curious about the topic.” And Jacobi said, “Well, is it perhaps because he feels his parents have strayed from God’s appointment?” And I was like, “That’s much smarter than my idea. Play that.”

What is his novel about?
Monroe: He told me … It was a sci-fi thing. But he may not want me to share. It was very in-depth. He was explaining each of the characters. I was [mouth open]. He is incredible.

Who’d win in a face-off between Longlegs and Winifred?
Monroe: Oh, wow. Absolutely Winifred. Longlegs would put up a good fight. But I think she’d outwit him.

Wigon: I have to mull that further. Both of those characters are pretty vicious.

And I read that the castle you shot in was haunted. Did you see anything?
Wigon: That’s what Randall — the current Lord Dunsany, as is his title, of Dunsany Castle, told me. The place is insanely large. It is maybe 30,000 square feet. He told me there was one night when he was on the upper floor and he saw a woman he’d never seen before walk down the hallway into his office and shut the door. And he walked in and she wasn’t there.

My main thing was just, I always had my backpack on me, and every single time we were finishing the day by working outside, I’d have to go into the castle to get my backpack before going home. And you’re in this ancient, enormous, dark castle, and nobody else is there. And I would run in and grab my backpack and run out. 

Monroe: I would not want to be in there alone.