For a few years in a row, horror fans were treated to a brand-new Mike Flanagan-directed Netflix series. Eventually, the helmer and the streamer would go their separate ways, but not without one last project. That came in the form of 2023’s The Fall of the House of Usher, which served as an adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe short story of the same name. Over the years, Flanagan has recruited multiple impressive stars for his projects and The Fall of the House of Usher was no different. This time around, he brought in some new names to the Flanaverse, like Star Wars legend Mark Hamill and Battlestar Galactica baddie, Mary McDonnell.
Another fresh face added to the call sheet was Scream series alum, Willa Fitzgerald, who appeared in the production as the younger version of McDonnell’s character, Madeline Usher. Overall, the series received positive reviews from critics with many praising the performances and mirroring work done by Fitzgerald and McDonnell — both actresses were nominated for “Best Supporting Actress in a Limited Series” at the Critics Choice Awards. According to the former, who joined Perri Nemiroff for a recent installment of Collider Ladies Night, the on-point parallels were no coincidence as, from day one, Fitzgerald set out to play her version as close to McDonnell as possible.
Looking back on the show’s audition process, Fitzgerald said:
“It’s really funny, actually, I got the audition sent to me, and
I knew I was playing a younger version of someone,
and I was like, ‘I know they’ve already cast this person.’ So I immediately emailed my team and I was like, ‘They need to tell me who I’m playing.’ I was like, ‘How am I going to do the tape without knowing who I’m supposed to be a younger version of?’ They wrote back, and they’re like, ‘Well, apparently, they’re not telling anybody yet.’ And I was like, ‘Okay…’ So I did the tape and sent it off. A week later or something, they’re like,
‘They want you to retape. It’s Mary McDonnell
. Can you just send it ASAP?’ I was like, ‘I knew that I needed to know.’ [Laughs] I knew who Mary was but I watched some stuff that she’d done recently, some older stuff, and then resent in the tape.”
Fitzgerald and McDonnell Built Madeline Usher From the Ground Up
It’s easy to imagine that working with another actor for the same character could lead to a clashing of egos with the wrong people involved. Each person is entitled to their vision of the character — especially when they’re decades apart from one another — so it’s not unfathomable to see how this may have gone downhill quickly. But when it comes to Madeline Usher, Fitzgerald says that her vision meshed creatively with McDonnell’s. She told Collider:
“But for me,
there’s no Madeline without Mary because that was my North Star
when I was even conceiving of my interpretation. Obviously my interpretation of the character
is
different than her of the character because the
character
is different. The character at that point in her life is a different person. When I think about who I was 20 years ago, 10 years ago, that’s a different person. So I think that there was this
beautiful freedom in the choices
that I made about the ways in which she interacted with her environment that I got to make because she’s at a distinctly different point of her life and
has so many fewer experiences
understanding how she sees the world at that point in her life. The choices that she’s making and the things that are happening to her create Mary McDonnell’s performance and the person who Madeline Usher is by that point in the story.”
Willa Fitzgerald Studied Mary McDonnell’s Work
Revealing how she was sure to be nailing the same mannerisms and ticks as McDonnell’s Madeline, Fitzgerald said:
“A huge thing for me before I was even on set — because they were shooting for months before we shot our flashback stuff, which we did in a block shooting style at all at once — I remember very early on asking the producers and everybody to send me Mary’s dailies, and so they did, which was lovely and amazing. I didn’t know if they were going to. So,
I would get the selects of her dailies sent to me every time she shot
, and I would just watch them over and over and over again, and listen to the way that she spoke, see how she carried herself, see where her attention was. It was a really unscientific process; it was really just like osmosis. [Laughs] I really was just like, ‘Give me Mary McDonnell,’ and
I was just trying to understand intuitively who she is
. And I had a lot of time, which was lucky. I think I had probably a month and a half solidly. We ended up shooting a little earlier than we thought we were going to, so everything got pulled up a little bit, but luckily I’d already had a lot of time to spend with it.”
The Fall of the House of Usher is now streaming in its entirety on Netflix. You can watch Fitzgerald in the latest episode of Collider Ladies Night below.
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