Samantha Sloyan has played various roles across the Mike Flanagan horror universe, both empathetic and extremely hateable. Her scheming, self-righteous Bev Keane was the standout performance of Midnight Mass. In Midnight Club, she played a witchy herbalist with a dark secret. And she was a calming presence as Leigh Crain in his breakout Netflix hit, The Haunting of Hill House.
But in Flanagan's latest, a modern reimagining of the Stephen King classic, Carrie, Sloyan rolls those various elements up into perhaps her greatest role yet: Margaret White (aka Carrie's mom).
Sloyan's version of Margaret is far more complex and nuanced than the one depicted by Piper Laurie in Brian De Palma's 1976 film, or even the version in King's original novella. Flanagan tears the story of Carrie down to its studs and builds something new, with Margaret playing a more important role than ever before, though she's still a tragic figure, at best.
"I think she fails her daughter in a lot of ways," Sloyan tells Polygon. "She's loving her in the wrong way."
Polygon connected with Samantha Sloyan over Zoom to discuss playing Maragret White in Carrie, how she approaches playing complex villains, and what it's like being part of Mike Flanagan's troupe of recurring actors. Flanagan himself also weighed in to praise Sloyan.
The Carrie showrunner puts it bluntly: "She's honestly one of the best actors I've ever met."
Redefining Margaret White
If Flanagan was going to make a Carrie show, he couldn't just retell the same story stretched out over eight episodes. He needed to completely re-imagine it, and Sloyan's character was a huge part of that.
"Mike's point of view for this — of “why Carrie?” — was to bring everything down really to its foundation and then rebuild it as a different structure in a lot of ways," Sloyan says. "A big portion of that is Margaret. He really wanted Margaret and Carrie's relationship to be a loving mother and daughter. And if you do that, you're really fundamentally changing Margaret and Carrie's storyline."
Carrie's homelife in Brian De Palma’s 1976 Carrie is pretty horrific. Flanagan wanted something a little less disturbing. There's real love between mother and daughter in the series, even if it's colored by fear and emotional abuse. For Sloyan, that relationship is crucial to launching the show's version of Carrie White into the world.
"Carrie may not have an ease with interacting with the world, but she has a real interest in it," Sloyan says. "To have that, Carrie can't come from a monstrous home. We know she came from a mother and father, and we see he really cared for her, educated her, wanted her safe."
One of the biggest changes to the source material in Flanagan's Carrie is in how it updates the way Carrie is bullied to reflect modern society. Carrie's tormentor, Chris Hargensen (Alison Thornton) creates an anonymous Instagram account named Carrie Red to spread cruel rumors about everyone at school. In response, Margaret does something unexpected: She embraces social media, creating her own account and launching a movement to expose the student behind Carrie Red and bring her to justice.
Margaret succeeds, but she also becomes enraptured by the power of social media, ultimately creating an anti-bullying movement that grows beyond her control and takes on a violent edge. Even when it's clear she's gone too far, Margaret refuses to back down.
"She drank the Kool-Aid and is excited by the attention," Sloyan says. "Now, if you ask Margaret, I think she would deny that completely, but we see as the audience that she's just as susceptible to the charms of the internet as everybody else is."
Flanagan adds: "Every decision she makes is driven by love. It's a misguided love, and a frightening love by the end. That's just something Sam is so capable of doing — that level of commitment and perspective."
Samantha Sloyan's superpower
Sloyan doesn't only play villains on Flanagan projects. That said, she's very good at being bad onscreen.
When I ask what it is about Sloyan that makes her so fun to hate, the showrunner reveals a surprising answer: It's her incredible power of empathy.
"It's so counterintuitive because Sam is maybe the least villainous person I've ever met," Flanagan says. "Sam's one of the kindest, most egoless people I've ever encountered. That's one of the things that makes her so extraordinary. Sam approaches the world with a profound empathy and she approaches these villainous characters with the same empathy. She's very fast to say, 'Oh yes, I know that they're an antagonist. I know that they're a villain, but not in their mind. In their minds, they're the hero, they're the victim.' She leans so fully into that perspective and is so determined to truly see the world through their eyes."
Confronted with the same question, Sloyan offers a deeper look into her own unique acting process.
"When I play characters, I don't really come at it from a point of view of them being a villain because it really colors how you connect to the choices," she says.
Predictably, Sloyan doesn't see Margaret as the villain of Carrie.
"If I love my daughter, I'm willing to do absolutely anything to protect her, then what happens next? Margaret isn't interested in becoming modern in any way. She's not interested in entering this stream at all. All of her decisions are really aggressive and trying to shut things down. She says in one episode, 'We'll get back to normal soon enough.' Her goal is to put Carrie back in that house. At the core, I think that she's wrong."
Sloyan's most iconic Flanagan role is undeniably Bev Keane on Midnight Mass, an irredeemable villain who refuses to admit culpability right until the bitter end — even as the unholy being she thought was a literal angel turns out to be a demonic creature feeding on the entire town. Unlike Margaret White, who makes a lot of terrible choices in Carrie but always like a human being trying to do what she thinks is best, Bev is a religious fundamentalist who gleefully wields what little power she has against her non-Christian enemies.
And yet, Sloyan still found a way to relate to the character.
"She believed so intensely that she was right, to the point where she was unwilling to see that this is not an angel," Sloyan says. "Her life before that — she hadn't accomplished anything she wanted, and she was going to take this opportunity for all the wrong reasons. Not for religious beauty, but to be adored personally, to be correct, to be empowered, to be the one who was right, and that means everybody else is wrong. If I'm chosen, it means that you're not chosen."
Five years later, Flanagan still looks back at Sloyan's performance on Midnight Mass with a mix of admiration and disbelief.
"It was extraordinary to watch her approach Beverly Keane in Midnight Mass through the eyes of someone who did not believe Beverly Keane was the villain of the story," he says. "It made the character all that much more frightening."
"What she accomplishes in Carrie is in so many ways the opposite of that. It was such an extraordinary opportunity was to take a character who has always been this fanatical abuser, who hates and fears her daughter so much, and to have that character be driven by a love for Carrie that she doesn't know how to express, she doesn't know how to keep her safe, and that love hurts her daughter. Sam commits to that so fully."