As a Virgo, actress Carla Gugino admits that she’s drawn to precision in all things.
Fortunately for her, she’s found that precision in her frequent collaboration with writer / director Mike Flanagan. The pair first worked together on 2017’s Gerald’s Game, Flanagan’s adaptation of the Stephen King novel in which Gugino plays a woman handcuffed to a bed while her husband lays dead on the floor. That acclaimed performance led to a series of equally acclaimed limited series starting with the brilliant and terrifying The Haunting of Hill House. Her most recent Flanagan collaboration — the Edgar Allan Poe-inspired The Fall of the House of Usher — that brought Gugino richly deserved acclaim, including a nomination for Best Actress in a Movie/Miniseries at the Critics’ Choice Television Awards.
Gugino believes the successful collaboration stems from Flanagan’s insistence on pushing an exploration of the human experience beyond expected boundaries.
“So often, especially as a woman, you’re asked to be smaller or a little less complex than you really are. So, I sort of resist when people say, ‘You play strong women.’ That’s not the way that I look at it. What I do look at for is can we excavate things that are unexpected? Mike is always really interested in doing that,” Gugino explains. “I love his writing. I love his directing, and I feel really taken care of in the edit. He keeps bringing things my way that pushed me, that terrify me — not because of the genre but because of the requirements of the role.”
It’s no wonder that Gugino’s role in Usher would have terrified her. She plays Verna (an anagram for Raven, a signature Poe reference) who embodies eight different incarnations across the limited series. That’s not eight different characters. Rather, it’s the entity known as Verna representing herself to the doomed Usher family in eight unique personas. Despite an outstanding ensemble that includes Bruce Greenwood and Mary McDonnell, the series itself hangs on Gugino’s performance as the character who keeps the thread of the show together.
One version of Gugino’s Verna emerges as the literal Masque of the Red Death. Another transforms into a rage-filled chimpanzee. Each incarnation its own specific, very human, entity on a deadly mission that remains emotionally connected to the on-screen events.
“She’s the hand of fate. She’s the executor of karma, to an extent. If she remained detached completely, then that’s not very interesting, and the thrust of the whole show doesn’t work. She has a sense of playfulness because she has this feeling of seeing the Usher family as these sweet and messed up little people. It’s a story that she’s seen play over and over across the centuries,” Gugino shares. “If I were to play that character with some kind of judgment or not be fully engaged, then we wouldn’t get that story across. So, it felt to me that she can tap into a human, into a person that actually exists. She just brings them into that story because the persona works for that scenario, but it’s still a person. I think that was really key.”
That she avoids playing Verna as an other-worldly entity makes Gugino’s performance all the more powerful. Each incarnation has its own story, its own individualistic persona. As she leads the Usher family to horrible death after death, she still engages with them as a human would.
One of her final sequences — a deeply moving sequence with Lenore Usher (Kyliegh Curran) — actually brought Gugino to tears when she first read the script. Lenore is the innocent amongst the corrupt Usher family, but she too falls prey to Verna thanks to the inescapable feat of generational trauma. But before Verna takes Lenore’s life, she reveals her bright and impactful legacy as a way of soothing her.
“When I read that scene, I really wept. I found that scene to be incredibly impactful on the page, and it was one that I thought I really need to work on. One of my main challenges in that scene was going to be to not cry,” Gugino admits. “We’re doing an entire show about cruelty, selfishness, hubris, all of these things and how that generationally has massive impact. So this one girl, because of her honesty and her tenacity, has the beauty and the desire to help people which carries on generationally and has massive impact after she’s gone. So it really helped me for Verna’s mission here to be to get Lenore to understand that before she goes. I found that incredibly profound. It was really, truly one of the most extraordinarily creative experiences that I’ve ever had.”
The Fall of the House of Usher streams exclusively on Netflix.
