Rebecca Ferguson talks horror and why Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep made her cry
Rebecca Ferguson took a crash course in horror movies ahead of making the sequel to The Shining, but even that couldn’t prepare her for some very tough days at the office.
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Rebecca Ferguson has played some challenging roles in the past, but until now none of them had ever reduced her to tears.
Since her breakout role in the BBC miniseries The White Queen, the Swedish actor as overcome her fear of heights for the extreme stunts opposite Tom Cruise in the Mission: Impossible franchise, survived a manipulative and murderous husband in The Girl On the Train and came to a sticky end in the Scandi-noir thriller The Snowman.
But she says that her new movie Doctor Sleep, the long-awaited sequel to Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick’s horror favourite The Shining , was another level entirely and at times left her a complete mess.
In it, Ferguson plays Rosa the Hat, the leader of a group of nearly-immortal creatures who feed off the psychic energy and suffering of children and she says that scene where she and her cabal tie down and torture a child (played by now 13-year-old star of Room and Wonder, Jacob Tremblay) was “the emotionally toughest scene I have ever had to do”.
“The most challenging bit was acting out the scenes that were supposed to be beyond-measure horrible and acting against Jacob Tremblay,” Ferguson says.
“He’s remarkable. I had to be on the receiving end of his reaction to what I did and it threw me. I started crying when he started acting and I realised I had to wipe away my tears before I f — ked up the scene.
“As a mother I am torturing a 12-year-old boy. I didn’t think that would have an effect on me but when the cameras rolled and he started acting and I started crying.”
Even though Doctor Sleep is a sequel to both King’s book and Kubrick’s film – both are considered horror classics even if the pair never saw eye-to-eye over the 1980 adaptation starring Jack Nicholson – Ferguson had never been a fan of scary films.
But having landed the role of the villainous Rose, she subjected herself to a crash course that included Nightmare On Elm Street, Halloween, Annabelle and The Strangers, and came to the conclusion that she had possibly sold the genre short.
“What I realised is that there are such subtleties and so many different levels to scaring and to becoming a scary character,” she says.
“I also watched a lot of interviews with serial killers and psychopaths and what is the difference between killing and having empathy and killing and not having empathy.
In all of that, Rose gradually grew out because she’s not a psychopath. It’s not that she doesn’t care – she doesn’t care about the object she is killing but she is doing it to feed the people she loves.”
But with Doctor Sleep coming on the coat-tails of another King adaptation, the hugely successful It, starring her compatriot Bill Skarsgard as the murderous Pennywise, Ferguson says clowns are still a very hard pass for her.
“They are bloody scary and odd aren’t they?”, she says with a laugh.
“We all know it. Clowns are supposed to be happy and funny and yet it’s the most intriguing character to make into a child killing subject. Nothing good comes from a clown.”
Having found her way inside Rosa’s twisted mind, to find the physicality of a 700-year-old psychic vampire, Ferguson enlisted the help Terry Notary, one of the world’s foremost motion capture performers, who has provided movements for an array of creatures in films such as Rise Of the Planet Of the Apes, Avatar, The Hobbit and The Avengers.
“We talked about bugs and insects a lot,” she says. “All of us had or own individual meeting with him and got a take on how we walked and moved and that was so much fun and important for the character as well. Rose has lived for over 700 years and has seen so much. For me I liked the element of someone walking forward but it looks like she’s actually walking backwards, effortlessly.”
Supernatural elements aside, 36-year-old mother of two Ferguson says the quest for eternal youth is still alive and well in Hollywood and the wider world, although she hopes attitudes are changing – or at least becoming more egalitarian.
“It’s not only Hollywood – the pressure for women to stay young has been the pressure of satisfying the men hasn’t it?” she says. “Because if you don’t like us now you will go for something younger. So hopefully we are gradually coming out of it and not seeing the need to constantly anti-age ourselves. But we now live in a world where men do the same thankfully – I guess gender equality hit on both sides.”
Ferguson also hopes gender equality will be to the fore in her next project, the eagerly anticipated coming adaptation of Frank Herbert’s revered 1965 sci-fi book Dune. Although the book was famously – and many would say disastrously – adapted by David Lynch in 1984, Oscar-nominated director Denis Villeneuve (Arrival, Blade Runner: 2049) has assembled a stellar cast including Timothee Chalamet, Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, Zendaya, Jason Momoa and Javier Bardem, that has raised expectations sky high for its release next December.
“I am more than excited,” Ferguson says. “It’s hopefully an extraordinary ride for people. I know that the first Dune was a cult classic and whether you liked it or not it gave a lot and was based on a science fiction bible. And what’s interesting is how we have tried to create, especially for the women, an equality that didn’t really exist in the time that Frank wrote it.”
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And then there’s her reunion with her Greatest Showman star Hugh Jackman in the thriller Reminiscence, directed by Westworld co-creator Lisa Joy, which started shooting this week.
“The one and only,” she sighs at the very mention of the Aussie heart-throb’s name, before adding with a laugh, “he’s such a bitch to work with.”
“He’s just phenomenal and I am so excited. When I found out that Lisa was doing this film and he was playing Bannister we just kind of jumped to the occasion to work together again. The fit was great and we didn’t have enough scenes together on The Greatest Showman.”
Doctor Sleep opens Thursday.