With our 2023 Annual Report turning to the world of Hollywood, we’re naming Carla Gugino our TV Performer of the Year for her work on Netflix’s The Fall of the House of Usher. Check out our full Annual Report here for all the best in music, film, and television of the year — including our list of the 25 Best TV Shows.
Carla Gugino entirely changes the way I think about acting while describing a key scene in The Fall of the House of Usher. “Sometimes, when a character feels too much, the audience doesn’t have the ability to feel it themselves, because the character’s doing it for them,” Consequence’s TV Performer of the Year says. “If the actor gives you the release, it’s not that it’s not gratifying, but it doesn’t allow you to have your own process of emotion as an audience.”
It’s insight that comes after years of working in film, television, and theater, essential to her work in House of Usher being her most captivating to date. In the Netflix horror series, Gugino plays Verna, who serves as a metaphysical representation of the karmic justice being inflicted on the Usher family, a pharmaceutical dynasty that draws not-so-subtle comparisons to the Sacklers.
House of Usher marks the latest collaboration between Gugino and writer/director Mike Flanagan, though the role is utterly unique. Gugino says that when Flanagan first pitched her on the idea, she said yes “before he finished the sentence.” He did promise, however, that unlike their past projects Gerald’s Game or The Haunting of Hill House, Gugino was “not going to be chained to a bed” or “haunted by a house and kill children.” “‘It’ll just be seven characters, and one of them will be an ape,'” she recalls Flanagan telling her.
Over the course of the series, Verna appears to the Usher clan in many forms, embodying seven different personas that range from a bold call girl to a terrified patient in need of heart surgery to, literally, a lab animal. “In a career that has spanned most of my life, I’ve never had the requirements that I had for this particular role, nor will I probably ever have again,” Gugino laughs.
It was an acting challenge similar to those tackled by the likes of Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers, although what made Verna such “an exciting and delicious challenge” was that each persona was the same character. “It was playing seven different incarnations of the same entity. It was important for me to never have this be some sort of master-of-disguises costume show,” Gugino says. “Rather, these are the ways in which these characters can receive Verna. And always we should feel this golden thread of Verna, so that if you really look deep enough, you’ll find her inside all of them.”
With a laugh, Gugino adds, “I didn’t have a lot of role models for that kind of exercise.”
The Fall of the House of Usher (Netflix)
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for The Fall of the House of Usher.]
Although Gugino says horror is not a genre she gravitates towards, she finds the richness of the subtext appealing. “It’s not so secret that genre allows you so often to reveal the truth in ways that a straight up drama can’t,” she says. “Because you get to distract people with these really fantastical genre elements and horror elements while you’re actually telling a story of karma, of decisions that we make that will affect the generations after us, and how we as human beings can often convince ourselves that what we’re doing is right.”
As American literature nerds and Flanagan fans know, House of Usher is inspired by the collective works of writer Edgar Allen Poe — even Verna’s name is an anagram of The Raven, another name used for the character. “She’s clearly not the devil,” Gugino says of her character, noting she’s instead “the hand of fate. Poe never really believed in heaven and hell, but he did believe… He may not have called them karmic acts, but the nature of karma.”
The hand of fate takes many forms here, and because of the nature of production, there were times Gugino had to play at least two of her personas on the same day: “So I needed to have these different incarnations in different parts of my body. They had different vocal qualities. Some of them had accents. They came from different centers in their bodies. They walked differently. I really needed to almost work from the outside to find the nature of a character and how that would manifest physically.”
As part of her preparation, Gugino worked with Terry Notary, the legendary motion capture artist whose credits include the modern Planet of the Apes films. “Mike had thought he would be very helpful for the raven and the ape aspects,” she says. “And it’s true that he was, but he also was a really indispensable ally in terms of exploring these different physicalities.”
Gugino also worked closely with Flanagan on each persona. “Mike has such a strong sense of what he wants, and because of that, he allows for collaboration in a really beautiful and exciting way, which I think reaps great benefits,” she says. “I would approach him and say, ‘I think this person might be from the Midwest, and in the script you allude to something about her breathing. If she can’t get enough oxygen and her system is breaking down on her as a heart patient, I want her to have thinning hair.'” That concept evolved, after a consultation with the hair department, into choosing a hair color for the character that, she laughs, “turns my skin just everything bad.”
The partnership worked the other way as well, as Gugino was reading Flanagan’s scripts as he was writing them, and thus was able to contribute immediate notes. “There’s a great sort of dialogue, where I’ll throw out an idea and he’s such a great writer that if it does [resonate with him], he will actually take the idea that I had to a place I wasn’t expecting, and make it even more interesting.”
The Fall of the House of Usher (Netflix)
Out of that collaboration came the idea that Verna “remain curious” so it didn’t come off as if “she was just executing a job.” “There was an inevitability to that, which would lead to a sort of predictability, which I felt would not serve the story,” Gugino explains.
So she suggested to Flanagan that “every time Verna confronts one of these people who are about to die, she gives them a choice to make a different decision and to potentially change the course of their lives — and they don’t do it. And I think that’s incredibly disappointing to her, because while she doesn’t have human emotions as we think of them, I think she’s always waiting, with great curiosity, for someone to do something that she doesn’t expect. 95% of the time, human beings behave how she believes they will, but there’s that 5% of the time where she might witness an actual transformation.”
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In addition, Gugino says, “It was really fun to play those rare scenes where she does get embroiled further than she would like to, like with [Frederick Usher, played by Henry Thomas] — she has this moment where she isn’t just doing her job. She isn’t just actually curious, she has a certain kind of investment in what his demise may be. I always like it when you are able to set up rules for a character and then break them.”
The death of Frederick — a brutal “Pit and the Pendulum”-inspired “accident” — sits on the opposite side of the spectrum from the gentle passing of Lenore (Kyliegh Curran). That scene is where Gugino’s aforementioned restraint comes into play, as Verna explains to the young woman that her essence will live on in a meaningful way after her death. “As much as Verna was probably more moved than we’ve ever seen before, it felt important to hold it back as much as possible, which was not easy in that scene,” Gugino explains. “That was a scene that when I read the script really made me weep.”
That sort of approach is something Gugino feels she learned from working in the theater, where there’s “such a tangible conversation between actor and audience. Theater allowed me to realize that sometimes you need to feel it for them, because sometimes it’s about an audience being able to observe what a character’s going through. But if you want to really bring everybody into it, you need to let them have the experience.”
The Fall of the House of Usher is streaming now on Netflix.