Grace Gummer Embraces Scary Stories
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The last time WWD chatted with Grace Gummer was in 2017 in Dumbo, not far from where she was living. Gummer was following a series of film roles with a part in the Rami Malek-led series “Mr. Robot” and well on her way to showing people that the talents of her mother, Meryl Streep, hadn’t fallen too far from the tree.
Five years later and Gummer is now in her backyard in Manhattan in the house she shares with husband Mark Ronson; the two married in 2021 and are expecting their first child together. After her day of press commitments the two are on their way to see “The Cost of Living” on Broadway, for a theater date night.
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She plans to hunker down around New York for the coming months of holidays and baby anticipation, which also conveniently gives her plenty of time to talk about her new series, “Let the Right One In.” The psychological drama/horror series, an adaptation of a Swedish novel, wasn’t an immediate sell to Gummer, who has never been much of a horror fan before.
“People love it so far. It’s weird, it’s people that I wouldn’t have thought would like this kind of show who are really into it,” she says, seated in her backyard on a warm fall morning. “That’s how I felt when I read it. The horror genre isn’t really my thing. But when I read it, I was like, ‘Oh, this is something completely different.’ It’s actually really interesting and it’s a lot deeper and there’s no gratuitous violence in it. It feels like it’s much more sort of accessible and relatable. There’s a human dilemma in there that’s relatable.”
The show follows Mark and his young daughter Eleanor, who is a vampire. After years on the run they return home to New York to try to find a cure, where they become part of a larger web of people all trying to survive. Gummer plays Claire, the older sister of another young vampire also on the hunt for a cure. Claire is an heiress to a pharmaceutical company loosely modeled after the Sacklers, and is the moral compass in a family dynamic that otherwise is very much without.
“I think what initially drove me to the show in general was Andrew [Hinderaker], the showrunner’s vision for it. He pitched it to me as this sort of larger metaphor for battling addiction — what lengths you will go to protect and save and help keep alive the people you love who are suffering,” Gummer says. “It felt like a human struggle that felt universal, and at the time especially — post COVID[-19], it felt like an important story to tell.”
Gummer received the callback right after she got engaged in April 2021, shot the pilot in June of that year, got married in August and then the rest of the show was shot.
“The tone of the show feels like the world we’re living in right now. This sort of chaotic, hostile, curious, very unknown, strange time we’re living in,” Gummer says. “Feeling like everything is on the brink, but the thing that we can understand the most is love. The love we have for each other. That just really spoke to me.”
She also relished the opportunity to have the show change her a bit, to make her reflect on her own family dynamics and her own relationship with her father, the sculptor Don Gummer.
“None of the feelings that I feel or I explored through myself in the show were clear and black and white, besides feeling deep, deep, deep love for a sibling or someone you love. That was very clear to me,” she says. “But it really challenged me to think outside of myself. To really deep, dark places of my soul to get there.
“To be an actor, you have to convince yourself on a cellular level that you have lived through feelings like this and have experienced this kind of pain,” Gummer continues. “To convince yourself that you are watching your brother tear open someone’s throat and tear their limbs off and eat them alive is something you can’t imagine — but you can imagine someone you love doing a horrible thing. You know what I mean?”
The side effects of which are, naturally, that it’s hard to leave such work at home.
“It puts you in a dark place,” she admits. “I’d come home and my husband would be like, ‘are you mad at me?’”
Once press for the show quiets, Gummer is staying put for the coming months. “I’m just going to have a baby,” she says of what’s ahead. “There are things I really want to work on. I want to give time.”
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