‘The Fall of the House of Usher:’ Star Mary McDonnell Bristles When People Call Madeline Usher a Villain

Two-time Oscar nominee Mary McDonnell (Dances with Wolves, Passion Fish) recently received two Critics’ Choice award nominations for her stellar work in Mike Flanagan’s Netflix Edgar Allen Poe-inspired limited series The Fall of the House of Usher. One of those nominations came from the Critics’ Choice Super Awards for “Best Villain in a Series.”

That mention gave me pause.

Is Madeline Usher a villain?

Often considered a horror variation on HBO’s massively successful Succession, Usher introduces to Madeline Usher, the COO (and brains) behind Fortunato Pharmaceuticals. Always seemingly three steps ahead of her brother Roderick (Bruce Greenwood), Madeline is the first to understand something sinister and other-worldly is at play as the Usher family rapidly dies around her. She’s a powerful woman, and if you allow the Succession comparison, she shares many similarities with Sarah Snook’s Siobhan Roy.

Does that make her villainous? McDonnell doesn’t think so.

“I absolutely don’t think of her as a villain. Not on any level. Thank you that you saw through that. I think, if a female character steps over certain boundaries that the patriarchy has set for her, then she can be declared villainous very quickly. I mean, I thought the nomination was great because I haven’t been recognized for my villainous qualities before in my career, so why not,” McDonnell remarked. “But it really is about a character stepping over a certain line that we still haven’t allowed women to cross, and so we immediately label them as the villain.”

McDonnell believes that Madeline Usher is a woman who holds and wields power, but she’s also a woman whose entire psychology is based in trauma. Orphaned at an early age (she saw her mother strangle a man in death with her dying breath), Madeline became uniformly focused on obtaining power. When she begins to understand who Verna (Carla Gugino) really is, she wants to leverage that power to negotiate with who is essentially a timeless entity. That supernatural power play and the knowledge she holds makes Madeline an immediate fan-favorite amongst Flanagan’s powerhouse ensemble.

But given Flanagan’s great love of all things horror, is McDonnell a fan of the genre?

“No. I’m too scared. I believe in everything. If I watch horror, then it would take me days to recover. I wouldn’t sleep. I just don’t have the ability to set that boundary, particularly with film,” McDonnell explained. “I so love cinema. I so love storytelling visually, and I just can’t shake it. So I never became a fan of horror.”

Given that fear of horror, Flanagan encouraged McDonnell to watch his 2021 limited series Midnight Mass before joining the project. Yes, she had to fast-forward through the more gruesome aspects of the series, but she reveled in his ideas, his writing, and the monologues he generously provided his troupe of actors.

In fact, it was a beautifully written monologue that Madeline recites near the end of the series that sealed the deal for McDonnell. It’s an incredibly powerful moment, impeccably delivered by McDonnell. Some have received the monologue as Madeline’s justification for her actions across the series. In reality, it’s a woman at the end of her life raging against the injustices and inequality plaguing modern America.

That unique voice spoke to McDonnell in ways other roles haven’t.

“Madeline Usher really got to me at the end with her final monologue, and I just could not pass up the opportunity to address everything the way she does. Yes, we can all agree she scorches the earth on her own, but at the very end, when she goes after everyone else, it was so articulate and so braising. I’ve never really heard a woman speak that way, so there was no question that I had to do it,” McDonnell said. “We had to slow down shooting for COVID outbreaks, so there were many, many moments where we were kind of sitting still. During one of those, the [Roe v. Wade] Supreme Court decision came down, and Mike and I had a conversation about how that might resonate with Madeleine. Within a day, he added it to her monologue. I couldn’t have been more grateful. It’s one of the most important things a writer has ever done for me, to collaborate with how we both feel about an event and immediately find a way to put it into the character. It was really important to me.”

The Fall of the House of Usher streams exclusively on Netflix.