Few actors have built a body of work in modern horror quite like Samantha Sloyan’s. She was the zealously self-righteous Bev Keane in Netflix’s Midnight Mass and the ill-fated Tamerlane Usher in The Fall of the House of Usher. Earlier this year she appeared in the Stephen King adaptation The Life of Chuck. Now she takes on her biggest role yet: Margaret White in Mike Flanagan’s Carrie, a series adaptation of King’s 1974 novel that premiered October 7 on Prime Video.
The role carries a long shadow. Piper Laurie earned an Oscar nomination for playing Margaret in Brian De Palma’s 1976 film, and the image of Carrie in her crown, drenched in blood at the prom, is among the most recognizable in horror. Sloyan says it’s that imprint that came to mind the moment Flanagan said the title. “Before he got through his first sentence, the second he said ‘Carrie,’ that was immediately where my brain went—the performance and the imagery,” she says. “I feel like I’ve always had that image in my head of young Carrie in the crown and the blood at the prom.”
Flanagan, however, had a different version in mind. “Before he finished his sentence, he said that he wanted this Margaret to be different, because he wanted the relationship between Carrie and Margaret to be fundamentally different, in the sense that he wanted them to be a loving mother and daughter,” Sloyan says. “That shifted so much of the story so fundamentally that I was like, ‘Oh, I’m not going to be playing the same character.’”
That “new Margaret” extended to how she looks on screen. For Midnight Mass, Sloyan was fitted with prosthetics and airbrushed to age her character, a process she says gave her “time to mentally breathe and arrive.” Margaret called for the opposite approach. “This was very much just my face,” she says with a laugh. “Which isn’t a bad thing—the older I’ve gotten, my eyes have gotten more sensitive, so just the technical part of wearing less makeup is so enjoyable.”
Even pared down, the makeup was carefully considered. Sloyan reunited with makeup artists Krista and Brooke, who had worked with her on Midnight Mass, The Midnight Club and The Fall of the House of Usher. Brooke came to the role with questions about who Margaret is. “She was really wonderful in bringing me ideas like, ‘Well, when she’s podcasting, has she bought makeup? If she has, what kind of makeup is accessible to her, and what is she interested in doing?’” Sloyan recalls. “Part of the collaboration of working on a piece is these other people who are so gifted at their jobs have ideas that you’ve never had before.”
The wardrobe also tells its own story. Because both Carrie and Margaret make their own clothes, costume designer Tammy mapped out an arc for Margaret’s wardrobe, moving it from homemade and comfortable to something more militaristic. “Margaret is building these suits and going from her house shoes to work boots,” Sloyan says. “Tammy really had such a vision for when all that would happen, and I was so excited by that.”
Long-standing creative relationships like these run through Sloyan’s work, none more so than her partnership with Flanagan. Carrie marks their seventh project together, and she says the shorthand they’ve built is what makes the work exciting. “Sometimes different words mean different things to different people, so you have to get to know somebody to understand what they mean,” she explains. “It buys us so much more time because we’re not messing with that. He can be like, ‘Okay, great, we have that. Let’s try something entirely different.’ That’s one of the most exciting things about working with him.”
Given the material, Carrie could easily have been an emotionally draining shoot. But Sloyan says the heaviness tends to have the opposite effect on set. “A lot of the time, when you’re filming something like this, it demands that the mood on set be brighter, just because we’re all doing that every day,” she says. She credits the cast, and Flanagan’s knack for assembling “incredible ensembles,” for keeping anyone from “slogging home by yourself and trying to piece yourself back together.”
Her own way of letting go after a long day is simple. “I’m a big bath girl,” she says. She often leaves set with her makeup still on so she can take it off herself at home. “I like that little luxurious moment of really getting yourself clean from the whole day, getting in your pajamas and in bed—that feeling of warmth and cleanliness, I really enjoy.” On nights when filming wraps early, she’ll grab a castmate for dinner instead “and talk about what happened that day and what we’re thinking, and just decompress that way.”
Since the premiere, Sloyan says one of the most rewarding responses has come from friends watching the series with their teenagers. “Especially working with Mike, not a lot of my friends’ kids are seeing what’s going on,” she says. “I’m so proud of our show. I’m so proud of what it says. Knowing that people are watching it with their kids just makes me really happy, because it opens up those conversations. I think that’s really the best we could have hoped for.”
