Roderick’s grown kids, meanwhile, are an eccentric and diverse lot, living nasty lives of privileged decadence. The father of multiple children from different mothers, Roderick built Fortunato, as is shown via extensive flashbacks, with the help of his sister Madeline (Mary McDonnell in present day, Willa Fitzgerald in flashbacks), who shared her brother’s grim childhood and his ruthless drive to succeed. The patriarch of Fortunato Pharmaceuticals, Roderick Usher (an excellent Bruce Greenwood in the present day, and “Friday Night Lights’” Zach Gilford in flashbacks), frames the episodes by essentially confessing his sins to a prosecutor (Carl Lumbly) who had gone after his company. Having carved out a niche with “The Haunting of Hill House,” “Midnight Mass” and most recently “The Midnight Club,” Flanagan grafts this eight-episode series over Poe titles, only in a contemporary setting and with a more-than-passing nod to the transgressions of a major pharmaceutical company accused of knowingly selling an addictive product. English majors should get a kick from the names and titles, but the emphasis on excess detracts from a limited series worth watching upon a midnight dreary but that doesn’t deserve to be loved. Hotlines in other countries can be found here.Ambitious, intriguing and ultimately a trifle confounding, “The Fall of the House of Usher” represents Mike Flanagan’s latest macabre series for Netflix, this time taking a page from Roger Corman by adapting (even more loosely) the works of Edgar Allan Poe. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-80. In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. “And I can feel,” she says, “that part of me that’s like, ‘Don’t make me go there.’” But to know that she can? “Exhilaration.”Īt the Atlantic theater, New York, until 15 March. After the show, the cast take three more breaths and then she plays a song “that kind of brings me joy or makes me laugh or makes me want to dance”, something to help her shake it off.Įvery day, as she walks to work, she thinks about what she needs to accomplish that day, what her character will undergo. She and the rest of the cast take three breaths together, a ritual the director Lileana Blain-Cruz developed. Before each show, she prepares by running lines and listening to a piece of music that moves her closer to Carol, “a lullaby of death, basically”, she says. The violence in Anatomy of a Suicide is psychological, self-inflicted. “I find it so interesting that you can see a nipple shot off, but you can’t see a woman walking from the bed to the bathroom naked without being commented on.” (She doesn’t quite put a movie like Sin City in that category, but she recognises that its sex scenes didn’t come from character.) Still, she wished she weren’t asked about it quite so often because it speaks to a certain American puritanism. She calls sexuality “a primal part of who we are” and “part and parcel of who I am” and she’s interested in exploring it in her work, she says, “because as a woman, I find it to be a huge centre of our power that has been misused and misrepresented a lot of the time”. “I know literally three girls who started smoking because you used to smoke.” Gugino’s other current roles capitalise on that allure like Daisy, the thief she plays on the cable noir Jett (in televisual limbo now that Cinemax has killed its original programming division), or Stella, which she will act opposite Audra McDonald’s Blanche and Bobby Cannavale’s Stanley in a Streetcar Named Desire revival this summer.Ĭarla Gugino in Anatomy of a Suicide with Ava Briglia and Celeste Arias. “God we were all so in love with you in school,” another character says. She fascinates people even – or especially – when she doesn’t mean to. Her character, Carol, has a perilous kind of magnetism. “So for me, there were personal elements. “All of us have those moments when you just don’t know what your value is here and what the value of staying is,” she says. And it should.” She has been reading accounts of suicidal ideation and listening to podcast interviews, working toward someone who “is always trying to crack life. “It’s a really tricky place to live in,” she says. Playing a woman who wants to die makes emotional claims, too. It simultaneously tracks three generations of women in three time periods (roughly: the 1970s, the 2000s, the 2030s), with many lines spoken in unison, which means that it demands extreme technical rigour. Photograph: Everett/Rex ShutterstockĪnatomy of a Suicide spoke to her, Gugino says, viscerally and intellectually. Gugino with Dwayne Johnson in San Andreas.
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