Interviews
Stars of Peacock’s “Hysteria!” Discuss Satanic Panic Origins and Forming a Heavy Metal Band [Interview]
Anna Camp’s devout Christian Tracy Whitehead is at the frontlines of stirring up a Satanic Panic frenzy in Peacock‘s coming-of-age thriller “Hysteria!” Her central targets? High school outcasts and close friends Dylan Campbell (Emjay Anthony), Jordy (Chiara Aurelia), and Spud (Kezii Curtis).
That the trio is part of a heavy metal band draws Tracy’s ire, setting the stage for paranoia, mistrust, and occult madness when they decide to lean into their Satanic reputation. That backfires when a series of bizarre kidnappings, murders, and supernatural events trace back to the friends. That Tracy has domestic woes with her own daughter, Faith (Nikki Hahn), will only further complicate the growing division between teens and grownups alike in the small Michigan town plagued by, well, hysteria.
Written and executive produced by Matthew Scott Kane (Stitchers) and David Goodman (The Orville), “Hysteria!” explores the dark era of Satanic Panic through a coming-of-age genre lens, blending drama, comedy, and horror. Tracy Whitehead serves as one of the central antagonists, one that bears the strongest resemblance to historical figures tied to Satanic Panic, but expect far more than meets the eye to Camp’s character.
“I didn’t really base her off of anyone specific,” Camp tells Bloody Disgusting. “I drew from a lot of things. There’s a little Tipper Gore in there, obviously. But a lot of it is in the script. With each script I got, I got to learn more about Tracy because she starts off pretty small, and then you get to see who she really is, what made her who she is today, and the trauma she experienced in her past. And as an actor playing the ‘villain,’ you don’t normally get to go back in time and see what made them the way that they are, why they are so driven, and why they are so ‘kooky’ or ‘crazy.’ This was a real gift to get to go back in time because I think it created a lot of empathy for me, the actress, to have for Tracy. It also hopefully creates empathy for the audience. And they can look at Tracy in a different light after they see one of the episodes in the season. It was really exciting to get to play that role; I think they wrote an incredible character.“
HYSTERIA! — “Die Young” Episode 102 — Pictured: Anna Camp as Tracy Whitehead — (Photo by: Daniel Delgado/PEACOCK)
Tracy may be the driving force behind the hysteria and turning the residents against each other, but she at least raised her daughter well. Faith is at the frontlines of the horror in the series premiere, and the traumatic event winds up irrevocably altering her relationship with her prickly mother. Moreover, Faith simply wants to experience normality, out from under her mother’s oppressive thumb.
Hahn explains, “Something that I couldn’t wait to explore and that I think is so relatable is that really, at the end of the day, she is just trying to be a normal teenager, which is, I think, something everybody can relate to. She’s finding her own individuality. It definitely was fun to explore her kind of stepping into high school and adolescence for the first time and to kind of play around with that since these are her first experiences, a prom or boyfriend, crushes. So that definitely was a lot of fun to have room to explore that.”
While Faith’s journey in trying to piece together what happened to her and stand up to her mother makes for a rewarding arch in itself, the beating heart of “Hysteria!” lies with the rock band navigating their newfound popularity/infamy, friendships, and identity.
Of the three, the band’s frontman, Dylan, makes for the most brash and driven by hormones. In sharing how Anthony, Aurelia, and Curtis formed the tight-knit relationship between characters, Anthony gives insight into his character. “We actually had a band camp,” Anthony says. “We flew out three weeks earlier than we started filming, and we learned our instruments because I already played the drums, but Chiara learned the bass, and then I learned the guitar. So, we definitely had a lot of time to practice. It was five hours a day for three weeks.”
HYSTERIA! — “The Satanic Panic” Episode 101 — Pictured: Emjay Anthony as Dylan Campbell — (Photo by: PEACOCK)
It wasn’t just band camp; the actors took improv, too. Anthony adds, “It was definitely interesting. We had the improv class, which was more than an improv class. We really dove into our characters. I remember we would read scenes, and we were just asked questions like, ‘What is your character feeling right here?’ This and that. So, that definitely helped me dive into the character a lot. But the best thing about Dylan is that he just loves guitar. So, I think that’s definitely a safe space. He’s not very sure about anything except for his music.”
Aurelia explains, “What’s interesting about this friend group dynamic is everyone’s relationships are different. Even though we’re all together all the time, my relationship with Kezzi’s character and my relationship with Emjay’s character and their relationships, to me, create this really interesting triangle. It was really fun to be able to bounce off of the boys and feel really comfortable with them. We became our own friends off set as well. So, getting to play with that and rely on each other, go to work, and get excited to hang out every day with your friends and feel really comfortable in a working environment, getting to play around and just have fun with these characters.”
As for her character, Jordy, Aurelia was drawn to the layered role. Jordy isn’t just your stereotypical goth girl but a take-charge type whose intelligence puts her on the cusp of solving some of the season’s biggest mysteries. She tells us, “For Jordy, growing up, there were a lot of different transitional periods. Between her relationship with Faith and not really feeling like she necessarily fits in with the cool kids at school and being judged by everyone, I think that she uses her looks and the way that she represents herself as a form of self-expression. Our showrunner, Matt, talked to me about how growing up, he felt like he related most to Jordy and that there was an element for him of that deadpan sarcasm, which was his coping mechanism. Obviously, he’s not the same as Jordy, but he used that deadpan sarcasm in his life, and that’s the way that he communicated with others.”
HYSTERIA! — “Can I Play With Madness?” Episode 103 — Pictured: (l-r) Emjay Anthony as Dylan Campbell, Chiara Aurelia as Jordy, Elijah Richardson as Cliff — (Photo by: Daniel Delgado/PEACOCK)
“I think there’s a bit of a disconnect between her and her family and her relationships,” Aurelia continues. “Even the fact that she needs to change and transform herself outside of her home in order to go to school, and there’s a part of her life that her parents will never understand; there’s a part of her life that her friends will never understand. But I feel like there’s so many layers beneath the surface, and there’s so much that she’s been through to get to where she is. Being able to fully have Spud and Dylan as her friends, whom she can rely on, are pretty much the only people in this world who truly know her. I think that’s her safe space. She chooses to go along with Dylan’s crazy plan because she adores him, wants to see this through, and wants him to be happy. But I think she knows the whole time that shit’s about to hit the fan.”
If Dylan is the more impulsive one to Jordy’s more reserved intellect, Spud often acts as the comic relief and peacekeeper when rifts emerge. Kezzi’s character may be prone to jokes and spouting conspiracy theories, but there’s a grounded intelligence that’s often overlooked by everyone around him. Kezzi agrees, “Yeah, between talking to Matt, our amazing showrunner, and our first episode director Jordan [Vogt-Roberts], it was really important that what Spud was saying was not exactly far-fetched. It was almost like what he was saying was outlandish, but there was some truth to it, and I carried that with me throughout the show. If I had to say some funny banter here, it would be in truth. So, it was just keeping, I don’t know, just a reality lens on the character at all times, just looking at things from all angles.”
HYSTERIA! — “Dance Macabre” Episode 104 — Pictured: (l-r) Kezii Curtis as Spud, Chiara Aurelia as Jordy (Photo by: Mark Hill/PEACOCK)
Of the three, Spud also shares the most scenes with Bruce Campbell, who plays the compassionate Chief Dandridge. “Bruce is the truth,” Kezzi says with a grin. “That’s the saying I have for him now. Emjay had said it earlier; he carries himself as a veteran because he is. He’s been on multiple sets. He knows how it’s supposed to go, but he’s also so approachable. It was really cool to be able to collab with him on scenes and be like, ‘Oh, I didn’t think about it like that. Did you think about it like that?’ So, I mean, for Bruce specifically, because I had the most scenes with him, it was honestly just like another fun day at work.”
All episodes of “Hysteria!” premiere on Friday, October 18, 2024.
Nothing is the same when two crewmates return to shore in Rose of Nevada, the latest by Enys Men filmmaker Mark Jenkin.
Time and reality blur for stars George Mackay (Wolf, 1917) and Callum Turner (Green Room, “Neuromancer”) in the hallucinatory time travel mystery releasing in New York and Los Angeles theaters on June 19, 2026.
But this isn’t your standard time travel movie.
Rose of Nevada bends time and genre in its exploration of Cornish identity and community, upending the lives of Nick (MacKay) and Liam (Turner). There’s a listless, dreamy quality to the time travel, and for inspired reason: Jenkin approaches it like a haunting.
While time travel was on his mind early in the writing process, Jenkin’s partner and collaborator asked a question that unlocked Rose of Nevada and inspired the filmmaker.
Jenkin explains, “I remember saying to Mary [Woodvine], my partner, who’s in the film, I said to her, ‘God, it really seems like I’ve fallen into this thing of either making films about ghosts or films about time travel,’ and then she said to me, ‘Yeah, but aren’t all ghost stories just time travel films, and aren’t all time travel films just ghost stories?’ And then I thought, ‘Oh, great. So I’m not making two types of films. I’m actually always making one type of film.’ But that was ultimately liberating because I thought there’s a nice gap or a crossover in the perception of genres, there’s a lot of room to play and to be free within that.”
“Once I’d abandoned the idea that I was going to master quantum physics in any academic sense,” the filmmaker continues, “It was incredibly freeing because I thought, ‘Well, I can just set my own rules here,’ and it really doesn’t matter what the rules are as long as you stick to them. You can’t bend them for the sake of the plot or for the sake of a character arc or something. You have to establish those rules upfront and stick to them, which made me really think I’ve got to limit the time travel element. This film can’t be about time travel.“
Bearing the brunt of the time travel disruption is Mackay’s Nick, a man struggling to support his family before the ill-fated voyage upends his entire world. It’s the type of role that was an easy yes for the actor, simply because of the filmmaker behind it.
“I saw Bait at the cinema when it was first out a few years ago and was so struck by it,” Mackay tells BD. “I just hadn’t seen a film like it. I want to work with the best directors. I want to work with the best directors and people who have a singular vision. As an actor, the process of work is almost my biggest draw, as well as what a story’s saying, but I think you learn by doing, and if I can do my bit in as many different ways as possible. The physicality and the discipline of Mark’s filmmaking, how that is so entwined in the DNA of the film, and therefore in the way that I work within it, that was the biggest draw. I’m just a fan of Mark’s. I was just very pleased to be involved.”
That reflects in Rose of Nevada‘s unique casting; Mackay initially was eyed for Liam.
“When I first got the call to meet Mark at the audition stage,” Mackay said, “We didn’t wind up reading scenes, but they said, ‘There’s a project. There are two roles in it that you could be right for, and Mark is leaning towards you for Liam.’ So, I had a look at Liam, Callum’s role, and had my interpretation of the script ready to talk about it and what I thought that character was, who he was, and how I’m thinking about how I might inhabit that or what I saw in him. And when we met, we didn’t talk about the film at all. We spoke about everything else. But following that meeting, I got the message, said, ‘Mark would like you to be part of the film, but he thinks you’re definitely more of a Nick,’ which I think I just may be a complete sheep because I went, ‘Of course I’m Nick.’
Mackay continued, “But it’s funny, I do have in my own life, I just started a family, and so much of my last few years of being has been trying to figure that balance and what that means and how you navigate that. So with family being at its core and all the kind of conundrums that come with staying level with that, that rang true. So I felt like I understood objectively, I have my interpretations of what both men mean to each other and within the story, but then once I was playing Nick, I just became about a very present focus on who he was and what his situation was. What I liked about him is that he’s a very straightforward bloke. In the best possible way, he’s quite a simple man. It’s just he’s in an extraordinary situation.”
Jenkin wrote Rose of Nevada during the pandemic lockdown that had forced a halt in production on Enys Men. He’d return to rewrite once Enys Men had been completed, creating overlap between films. “They are even more in conversation than you’d think because the first draft of Rose of Nevada was before I’d made Enys Men, and then everything I learned through the making of Enys Men, I fed into Rose of Nevada. But also the reaction to Enys Men, all the critics and writers and audience members who are telling me what Enys Men was about. I’m always the last to realize what I’ve done, I think like most filmmakers. You don’t really know what you’ve made a film about until the audience tells you. I was able to feed that into Rose of Nevada and also scale it up a little bit. So, yeah, in some ways it predates Enys Men, and in some ways it follows on from it,” he said.
Jenkin’s latest caps what’s unofficially been dubbed his Cornish trilogy, a moniker that initially surprised the filmmaker, but he’s come to embrace it. A recent revisit of Bait made it even clearer. “I can now understand why people are linking the three films together. I’d forgotten how linked they are, which is amazing, really, considering the first draft of Bait was written in 1999. So, most of my adult life has been one way or another making this trilogy. I am quite looking forward to starting the next chapter.”
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