Imagine the dinner table conversation between writer/director Mike Flanagan and his wife Kate Siegel that spawned Flanagan’s latest Netflix’s Midnight Mass.
The horror limited series partly succeeds because it’s so convincingly rooted in the broad spectrum of the human experience. Parenting. Religion. Mortality. Addiction. All of it lives within Flanagan’s Midnight Mass screenplay. Part of it stemmed from internal conversations with himself, but much of it comes from actual dinner table dialogue between the married couple.
“There is a certain part of it that I think happens at the dinner table. I’m just talking about random things we’ve been through at the time, sobriety and religion had been on both of our minds quite a bit. Mike grew up as an altar boy and a devout Catholic and has become an atheist. I was raised very culturally Jewish but also became an atheist as I grew up, and so it lent itself to very interesting and confusing dinnertime conversations,” Siegel explained. “During that time, Mike was sober, and I was still drinking. I’m no longer drinking, but we had very different viewpoints. In our household, Mike is often the one with a more black and white point of view of the world, and I tend to be a little bit more moderate, a little bit more wanting to consider everybody’s point of view. To see how we can all come together and maybe not jump to conclusions. I like to think I see a lot of those conversations turn into Erin Greene.”
Given the intensely religious text within Midnight Mass, it seems reasonable to assume that Flanagan, Siegel, and others perhaps wanted to explore deeper, unresolved feelings where religion is concerned. Admittedly, the series takes an extremely dark view of religion, not faith itself but more in terms of religious fanaticism. The series is set on an isolated island community where strange and deadly events begin to happen after the arrival of a mysterious priest (Hamish Linklater).
Siegel’s Erin Greene begins the series as a pregnant woman but faced with an unimaginable crisis. Her baby literally disappears from her body. There’s no blood. There’s no physical trauma. She’s just not pregnant.
To play the aftermath of that event, Greene pulled from her own experience as a mother and all of the fear and apprehension surrounding parenthood.
“There is a moment of absolute terror in every ultrasound when you are pregnant. When you’re waiting to hear the heartbeat, when you are watching the technician stare at the screen, and you can’t see the screen. Luckily for me, with my two children, it was always positive outcomes, but in order to play Erin, I had to open that door and go in there,” Siegel admitted. “As an actor, the first level is making yourself feel the emotion, and then the real artistry is making somebody else feel an authentic human emotion. I hope that there are people who recognize that moment in Erin’s face, and they go, ‘Yes, that’s what it felt like. That’s what it feels like when the doctor is squinting at the screen. That’s what it feels like when you’re just hearing the static but none of the heartbeat’.”
Yet, don’t think Siegel feels extraordinarily tormented leaving the set of a Mike Flanagan horror series every day. In fact, she considers the experience of “trauma recall,” as she puts it, an extension of childhood make believe or a healthy extension of imaginative play we experience as children. The trick is to pull yourself out of it in a safe way.
One of Siegel’s most personally rewarding sequences within Midnight Mass happens in a dialogue about faith, Heaven, and the afterlife between Erin Greene and Zach Gilford’s Riley Flynn. It’s an extended scene featuring pages of hefty dialogue, but it wasn’t a traumatic experience for Siegel at all.
Siegel praises Gilford’s dedication and presence within the scene for making it seem effortless.
“I was so blessed with Zach Gilford. He is not only a remarkable actor, but an unbeatable scene partner. He is present and kind and generous and patient and all of the things you hope for when you get the script. What I did was I spent about two weeks getting it completely memorized, and by that I mean I could have started on any word. If you just give me the word in the middle of the monologue, I can go forward, I can go backwards, I can jump lines like it is memorized. Then you spent a lot of time and imagination picturing a lot of those images. Like what I wanted when my baby grows up, who she would see, where she would be, or picturing the image for the last monologue of my hand on the grass and knowing what that would be. So a lot of visuals, plus the deep memorization, and then on the day, you hope you have a team as supportive as Zack, [cinematographer] Michael Fimognari, and Mike Flanagan, and you just run full speed off a cliff and don’t look back. You just see where it takes you as you sort of float down. So the last addition to the alchemy is magic — bravery and magic.”
The actual most challenging sequence for Siegel to film in Midnight Mass was far from the heady material of that sequence.
Instead, it surprisingly emerged as a very technical sequence where she needed to hit very specific and rehearsed beats. Erin, a schoolteacher, needs to go to the school closet because she’s run out of Windex. There, she’s unpleasantly surprised by Samantha Sloyan’s Bev Keene. On the surface, it appears a simple, every day sequence, but in reality, it proved more challenging than Siegel expected.
“It was so hard to get the actual sequence of physical actions right on the right timing. Plus, to have freshness to it, to make it feel organic, and then having to maneuver my way through the desks, get through the doorway, walk down the hallway at the right place and land at the door,” Siegel laughed, “and then be surprised to find Samantha standing there, which of course I knew she was. It took me more than a handful of takes.”
Midnight Mass streams exclusively on Netflix.
