Mary McDonnell (‘The Fall of the House of Usher’): ‘All the roads of my career have led me to this’ [Exclusive Video Interview]

“He sent me all the episodes and I sat here for two days and said ‘this has got to be some of the most brilliant writing I’ve ever participated in,’” declares two-time Oscar and Emmy nominee Mary McDonnell about when she first read Mike Flanagan‘s scripts for his latest horror series “The Fall of the House of Usher.” For our recent webchat she adds, “for me, it was this confluence of elements that allowed us to believe every single second of this story, no matter where it went, and no matter what rules it broke, or even what rules it adheres to in terms of horror. I believed it!” Watch our exclusive video interview above.

SEE Exclusive Video Interview: Carla Gugino (‘The Fall of the House of Usher’)

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“The Fall of the House of Usher” was created by horror maestro Flanagan, based on various works and characters by 19th-century author Edgar Allan Poe, adapted into a single nonlinear narrative set from 1953 to 2023. The gothic horror drama recounts the rise and fall of wealthy big-pharma magnate Roderick Usher and the events leading to the grisly deaths of all six of his adult children. McDonnell stars as Usher’s ruthless sister Madeline, with Carla Gugino starring as a mysterious angel of death smugly preying upon the Ushers, and Bruce Greenwood starring as the older Roderick coming to terms with the sins of his past. The limited series also stars frequent Flanagan collaborators Henry Thomas, Rahul Kohli, Kate Siegel, T’Nia Miller and Carl Lumbly, with Mark Hamill joining McDonnell for the first-time in the “Flanaverse,” the affectionately-named subgenre of Flanagan-helmed horror series that includes other Netflix hits like “The Haunting of Hill House,” “The Haunting of Bly Manor” and “Midnight Mass.”

Over the series’ eight episodes, McDonnell plays the complicated Madeline with a calculating sneer and bravado that belies the pain of her underlying grief and regret. By the climactic final scenes of the series finale, Flanagan lets Madeline unleash her inner rage, gifting the actress a scene-stealing monologue chastising the people for their insatiable consumerism, “begging for more and more” of the poison that her family’s big pharma made a fortune selling. “When I got to that monologue, I just went, ‘there’s no way I can’t do this. There’s no way. I don’t care what happens here. I have to say yes to this.’ You don’t get that kind of truth compacted into a moment of complete letting go. It just doesn’t happen often in life. It doesn’t happen hardly ever in film, not at that level. And it doesn’t happen for women,” she explains. “I just thought, this is it. All the roads of my career have led me to this,” she says, adding that after “paring down to the point where something clicked in me, I understood the simplicity in the way that this was not a speech. This was an inner fire that just came tumbling out. And because she’s a brilliant woman, she’s able to put together these ideas like lightning. I worked on that as something that was inevitable kind of pouring out of her.”

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