Carrie-Anne Moss first heard about the new AMC+ drama Yaga at just the right time. The actress, best known for starring in popular blockbuster fare like The Matrix, Star Wars: The Acolyte, and Jessica Jones, says she just happened to be independently researching the mythology behind the Yaga’s plot right before she was brought in.
“I'd actually just been thinking about it, I'd say a week before,” Moss says. “I loved the fact that this had the lore of Baba Yaga. I'm someone who has always been interested in that story. It does work like that a lot for me, where I'll have a thought about something [and] suddenly a script will come across my path that has some kind of connection. I take those kinds of little nods from the ether as serious.”
Yaga, which is debuting an exclusive clip that you can watch in the player above as part of IGN Fan Fest: Fall Edition, offers a modern twist on the classic Baba Yaga myth. Based on the play by Kat Sandler (who serves as showrunner here), the show follows Rapp (Noah Reid), “a private investigator who arrives in the small coastal town of Whittock to investigate the disappearance of a young heir to a powerful fishery, Henry Park (Hudson Williams). He finds himself at odds with an apprehensive local detective, Carson (Clark Backo), a charismatic university professor with a taste for younger men, Katherine (Moss), and a labyrinth of enigmatic suspects, secret lives, and ancient magic.”
Moss, who I spoke to ahead of Yaga’s October 23 premiere, says her interest in the Baba Yaga–a legendary, sinister female monster from Slavic folklore–goes back decades.
“With the lore of Baba Yaga, there's so many different ways that that story has been told,” Moss says. “And our version is inspired by Kat's [play]. I had come across that story when I was in my 20s through a book called Women Who Run With the Wolves. There’s so many ways to tell the story. There's so many different versions of her.”
Fans who watch the show might best know Baba Yaga as the nickname of John Wick, played on screen by Moss’s Matrix costar Keanu Reeves. At one point in Yaga, Moss’s character humorously deadpans “What’s John Wick?” when the franchise is mentioned by another character. Moss says she recognizes fans might consider the line to be a meta joke, but she sees it differently.
“I'm a huge fan of John Wick, so I'll start with that,” Moss says. “And honestly, when I read that line, because it was written a couple of different ways, I'm always hesitant to put a nod towards that kind of thing. And it's not something that I intuitively want to do. It's not my thing. I think I shot it. I said it a couple of different ways, and in the end they choose what they want to put there. So I understand that it's kind of fun. I understand why it was there, and I'm okay with it being in there, but it's a throwaway line.”
Moss says she embraced the unbothered nature of Katherine during production, especially when it came to her on-screen scenes with Heated Rivalry’s Hudson Williams.
“I have some intimate scenes with younger men in this show,” Moss says. “My sons are close in age to Hudson. I mean that's what you do as an actor, right? I mean you're comfortable with that, but at the same time I was respectful of that too. And you feel, I don't know, I don't want to say embarrass[ed] but I could be his mom. And if you have scenes like that, you’re just kind of keeping your own energy, you're keeping your own distance in a way because you don't want to suddenly be their mom, which very easily can happen when you're a nurturing person.”
Moss says that the cast and crew of Yaga filmed the show at a breakneck pace, which she prefers to more drawn-out shoots.
“I think I was there for three weeks,” Moss says. “I have never ever experienced that where it was really fast. Normally when you're shooting something, you'll have a lot of lull time in between takes, which is actually exhausting. On this show, there was no lull. But when there was a hangout, it was definitely fun. I have to say that Noah and Clark were like a little team the whole time and made me laugh so hard. That felt really good. I don't know about you, but when I laugh from my belly, I almost feel like it's a year's worth of therapy.”
Moss, who’s been in some of the biggest franchises of the 21st century, says that while she doesn’t have any particular IP that she likes to nerd out over, she remembers being so caught up in movies as a kid that she would often return to the theater time and time again.
“I was looking at some pictures from when I grew up in the '70s and the '80s,” Moss says. “I went to see movies that I loved as an 11, 12-year-old girl 17 times. Grease. Rocky. Bad News Bears. I probably babysat and saved my money. That was a big part of what I loved to do. I feel that way when I discover a show. My husband and I have this little routine that we do sometimes like, ‘I can't wait ‘til we have dinner and meet me on the couch.’ I love the feeling of ‘I can't wait to see the next episode of a show.’ I do love finding a show and just wanting to watch every episode, and I hope that the people that watch Yaga feel that way.”
Yaga premieres October 23 on AMC+.
For more IGN Fan Fest, be sure to check out IGN’s website, YouTube, and social channels throughout the week for more than 90 exclusive reveals across games, movies, TV, comics, and collectibles. It all leads to a massive livestream October 14 packed with game announcements, trailers, exclusive clips, celebrity interviews, and more.