Stephen King’s Carrie has been terrifying audiences for more than half a century, with Margaret White becoming nearly as iconic as her telekinetic daughter. But Mike Flanagan’s new eight-episode adaptation approaches that famously fraught mother-daughter relationship from a very different place.
At the center of it is Samantha Sloyan, the longtime Flanagan collaborator behind unforgettable performances in Midnight Mass, The Haunting of Hill House, The Fall of the House of Usher and Hush.
Ahead of the series’ premiere, Sloyan joined Bloody Disgusting’s The Boo Crew to talk about stepping into the role of Margaret White, working opposite Summer H. Howell’s Carrie, and continuing a creative relationship with Flanagan that has produced some of her most memorable work.
When Flanagan first approached Sloyan about playing Margaret, however, she had one immediate concern: Midnight Mass’ Bev Keane.
“I was really lucky. For some reason, Mike was hearing my voice as Margaret from the beginning,” Sloyan recalls. “When he talked about Margaret, to be honest, my first concern, the first thing I thought was, ‘But I did Beverly.’ I don’t want people to feel like I’m just always going to be in Beverly.”
Flanagan quickly made it clear that this Margaret would be something very different.
“He was like, ‘Oh, no, no, no. That’s not my Carrie. That’s not what we’re doing.’ And when he explained that in this piece, Margaret loves Carrie, it’s a loving relationship between a mother and a daughter, then I was like, ‘Oh, well, absolutely.’”
That single distinction fundamentally reshapes Margaret White.
Samantha Sloyan isn’t playing a mother devoid of love. In fact, it’s Margaret’s love for Carrie that makes their relationship so complicated and, eventually, so devastating.
Sloyan found her way into that contradiction by thinking less about Margaret as an iconic horror character and more about the complicated ways people within families can hurt one another.
“I don’t have kids, so I couldn’t come at it from that angle,” Sloyan explains. “The only memories that I had to inform Margaret were memories of being a daughter and a child with parents.
“In the best-case scenarios, we love each other, and yet we can hurt each other so terribly. Sometimes it can feel that the other person is incapable of showing up for you in the way that you need in that moment.”
For Sloyan, Margaret’s tragedy lies in her inability to separate what Carrie needs from what Margaret needs herself.
“Margaret was doing what was best for Margaret,” she says. “I think her failure is she’s unable to let her kid grow. She’s unable to let go that necessary amount to let them be their own person.
“She just couldn’t ever let Carrie be her own person. But it was because she loved her. It was never that she wanted to hurt her.”
That doesn’t mean this version of Margaret has lost her teeth.
Sloyan revisited previous adaptations of Carrie, particularly Piper Laurie’s legendary performance in Brian De Palma’s 1976 film, while developing her own take on the character.
“There’s something that Piper did that’s so incredible, which is she’s terrifying and unpredictable and dangerous as hell,” Sloyan says. “And I didn’t want to lose that in this loving relationship.”
The challenge became preserving that danger while making Margaret’s love for Carrie feel equally truthful.
“I needed her to have nowhere to go,” Sloyan says of Carrie. “She’s stuck between this school experience, which is horrific, and then her home life, which is not much better. I just wanted to make sure that my Margaret, in her moments of terrorizing Carrie, could be just as unnerving, even though different.”
Much of Sloyan’s ability to find this version of Margaret came from Howell herself.
Flanagan gave the cast something relatively unusual in television: rehearsal time before filming began. It was there that Sloyan first saw Howell’s Carrie come to life.
“With Summer, it was so instantaneous,” Sloyan recalls. “This is so in her bones in a way that you never catch her acting. None of it feels performative. It really feels like it originated from inside her.”
Seeing Howell’s interpretation also solved pieces of Margaret that Sloyan hadn’t yet been able to access on her own.
“Once I saw who her Carrie was, it made sense of things that I hadn’t quite figured out for Margaret,” she says. “It was like having the key to an encryption or something. ‘Oh, okay. Now I understand what that says.’”
Sloyan adds, “Her performance is so complete. The character she built is so complete. More so than really anybody I can think of that I’ve worked with. It was really remarkable.”
That intimacy between the two actors is especially important in a series that often slows down enough to simply let its characters talk, listen and exist together.
Sloyan’s extensive background in theater proved particularly useful.
“Mike works a lot like that in a lot of ways,” she says. “You really do feel like you’re a part of something that, personally, I feel when I do theater.”
One of the biggest lessons Sloyan carried from the stage is deceptively simple: listening.
“There’s never a point on stage where you’re off camera,” she explains. “You have to be involved in everything that’s happening all the time. I think just listening, you’re always paying attention, you’re always in, is really what I valued most from what I learned from stage.”
That same sense of attention is present in Sloyan’s distinctive delivery as Margaret. There’s a tension between what the character says and everything she is fighting to keep beneath the surface.
“I think so much of it has to do with there’s so much they’re not saying,” Sloyan says of characters like Margaret and Bev.
With Margaret in particular, she imagined an enormous amount happening beneath the character’s controlled exterior.
“I kind of imagine Margaret is always screaming in a way,” she explains. “But then what comes out, it’s so measured and thought through. And then that pops through. Where does she lose control of it? Where does the volume get turned up?”
After so many projects together, Samantha Sloyan and Mike Flanagan have also developed the kind of shorthand that allows them to explore those moments without overexplaining them.
“As a director, Mike truly loves actors. He loves us, and it’s fabulous,” Sloyan says.
“He is exacting, don’t get me wrong. He knows exactly what he wants. But there’s something about knowing exactly what he wants that gives him the freedom to allow new ideas to play around.”
Sloyan says Flanagan also understands that every performer requires something different from a director.
“He really is so great at reading what each individual person might need. For me, he knows when to give me a note and when to give me a second.”
Their history together has also created a deep level of trust.
When Flanagan first gave Sloyan the role of Bev Keane in Midnight Mass, she says there was little in their previous work together that would have suggested she could play the character audiences would eventually love to hate.
“There was nothing I had done with him or that he would have seen that would have given him the idea that I was capable of doing that,” she recalls. “But he just kind of knew that I was.
“That faith, you’re like, ‘Well, I guess I do know how to do it. Let’s go.’”
Sloyan believes Flanagan now knows when she has more to give in a scene and, just as importantly, when she’s revealing something too soon.
“He might be like, ‘Don’t give this to us now. That’s going to be later. So now have that emotion, but let’s not see it.’ Just that understanding of the full story and the patience to tell it.”
That patience is essential to Carrie, which has eight episodes to explore characters and relationships that previous adaptations had only a couple of hours to unpack.
The series also surrounds Sloyan and Howell with a sprawling ensemble that includes Matthew Lillard, whose performance particularly impressed Sloyan.
“Working with him is a dream,” she says. “I grew up with Scream.”
After recently revisiting Lillard’s work in Twin Peaks: The Return and The Descendants, Sloyan remembers wondering, “Why are we not watching Matthew Lillard all the time on everything?”
“But he’s just so great,” she adds. “His love of acting and theater… he’s just such a force for good in the world.”
For all of Carrie’s cruelty, rage and horror, Sloyan ultimately sees something else running through Flanagan’s work. Hope.
Asked what Flanagan understands about being human that keeps making her willing to “walk into the dark with him again,” Sloyan’s answer is beautifully simple.
“I think that he has hope. He just has hope for the world,” she says. “For me, I think that’s something that we need so desperately.
“I think he is always showing us, through how difficult things are, that there are people who want to be kind and there are people who want to make things better and who care about each other.”
And as for whether she’ll continue taking that journey with Flanagan?
“He’s got me for the rest of my life if that’s what he’s doing.”
Listen to Samantha Sloyan’s full conversation with Lauren and Trevor Shand on The Boo Crew Podcast Episode 482 for more on becoming Margaret White, working with Summer H. Howell and Matthew Lillard, her creative relationship with Mike Flanagan, and bringing this new interpretation of Stephen King’s Carrie to life.
All eight episodes of Mike Flanagan’s Carrie are streaming exclusively on Prime Video now.
