Amy Madigan is enjoying a late career renaissance as the terrifying Aunt Gladys in Zach Cregger’s horror hit Weapons. “It came out of left field for me,” she tells Screen.
Amy Madigan remembers vividly the first day she walked on the set of Weapons in her full Aunt Gladys get-up. The 75-year-old actress was barely recognisable as the child-snatching, scissor-wielding witch of Zach Cregger’s hit horror film, having been transformed by thickly applied make-up, subtle nose-sharpening prosthetics, a huge pair of spectacles and – most strikingly – a bright red wig with baby bangs that barely covered her bald-capped forehead.
“There were just a couple of guys there, Larkin [Seiple] the DoP, and a couple of the camera people,” recalls Madigan. “I walked into the room, and I could feel everybody collectively grabbing their breath. They weren’t expecting it. Zach was so happy. He loved that everybody was so taken aback.”
It is fair to say nobody was expecting Madigan’s transformation, nor her scene-dominating performance as the terrifying yet hugely entertaining Gladys. Nor, indeed, its sudden impact both on pop culture (spawning memes and Halloween costumes) and Madigan’s own career.
With Cregger’s movie grossing more than $268m worldwide for Warner Bros against a budget of $38m, Gladys has become an instant horror icon, widely credited as the film’s ‘secret weapon’ (Madigan was willingly absent from pre-release publicity, given how integral Gladys is to the film’s missing-children mystery).
Not only that, she has also found herself pitched into serious awards contention for the first time since her 1986 best supporting actress Oscar nomination, for playing Gene Hackman’s troubled daughter in Bud Yorkin’s blue-collar drama Twice In A Lifetime. Now it was Madigan’s turn to be taken aback.
“I wasn’t expecting that. I mean, at all. It came out of left field for me,” she says, sounding more exhausted than elated when speaking to Screen in mid-November. “I thought people would dig Gladys, and I knew people would like the film – and that’s the greatest takeaway from all of this – that people really get the film. But, all of a sudden, it turned into this other thing – this machine that you go through with awards season.”
This is nothing like her last awards merry-go-round, insists Madigan. “It’s completely different now. When I got that nom [for Twice In A Lifetime], I just said, ‘Oh, this is great,’ and I had to go out and buy a dress. I didn’t have a stylist or anything like that. Now everybody has a stylist, everybody has their team… And everybody has a podcast, you know? I mean, it’s flattering and it’s nice when people appreciate your work, but it’s a little jarring for me.”
Character actor
Madigan’s frankness perhaps should not come as a surprise from an actress whose strong, constant character work over the years in both film and TV (movies such as Gone Baby Gone and Pollock, which also featured her husband Ed Harris, plus shows such as Carnivàle, Grey’s Anatomy and Fringe) has never fully tilted her into stardom. “I’m not a leading lady,” she says. “I’ve had a different path, and a very varied career.”
She laughs about people approaching her in airports, having seen Field Of Dreams (in which she played Kevin Costner’s wife) or Uncle Buck (as John Candy’s girlfriend). “They’ll go, ‘So what happened? You’re not acting anymore!’ And I’m like, ‘Uh, okay, I got to get going…’”
Of course, in the flesh Madigan looks so different to the liminally human Aunt Gladys, she may never even be recognised in airports for that role either. But from the start, she was unbothered by its need for an extreme and, let’s face it, unflattering make-up job, which intentionally recalls Bette Davis in Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? – only recalibrated for jump scares. In fact, she embraced it.
“I didn’t have any hesitation whatsoever,” says Madigan. First, she was impressed with Cregger’s script: “It was very tight. There was no wasted verbiage in there and all the characters were very delineated.”
More importantly, she loved Gladys herself. “I thought, ‘This woman is fantastic. She’s very original.’ I know technically she’s supposed to be the villain, but I didn’t see her that way. She has a great confidence and vivaciousness and an ability to be laser sharp. It was just joyful to be able to do that.”
Furthermore, the long process of nailing Gladys’s appearance and undergoing that physical transformation did not daunt her. “It was very freeing to work with everybody and create this look,” she says, “because you didn’t have to put yourself in a contemporary box of what a woman is supposed to look like, of how you’re supposed to dress. I loved how Gladys was physically. I loved her whole thing. She puts it together. That to me, workwise, was just liberation.”
Madigan’s dedication even extended to the film’s grand guignol finale, in which – spoiler alert – the arcanely manipulative Gladys has the tables turned on her, and is pursued in a high-speed foot chase by 17 third graders who descend on her and literally rip her to pieces.
“Zach said, ‘We have someone that can stand in for you,’ and I said, ‘I’m doing this. I’m looking forward to it.’ I had to run fast and dodge through things – it was fun. Kind of kicked my butt, but that’s okay.”
Weapons reloaded
It might seem evident that filming such a memorable death scene would preclude Madigan from ever delivering an encore as Aunt Gladys. But Cregger has hinted in interviews that he is considering the possibility of a Weapons prequel that will shed some light on the character’s murky backstory. This is something to which Madigan is not averse.
“I like living in Zach’s brain,” she says. “He’s unique, and I’m sure he would come up with a good idea. But he’s only told me a little bit about it. He said, ‘I don’t want to give you a pitch right now or anything,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, you go off and shoot your movie [Cregger is already filming his Resident Evil reboot].’”
Madigan is not holding her breath. She describes herself as “an ultra-realist” and points out that Cregger has “a number of other things” planned, so there is every chance the Weapons prequel may never happen.
In the meantime, has its success brought more offers her way? “I’ve got to say I’m not being bombarded with things,” she replies. “It’s not like I’ve got a stack of scripts or something.”
There was one attractive offer, she reveals; however, the timing did not work out so she had to decline. “But people are more interested now.”
Could the Gladys effect work some magic on Madigan’s future career? “We’ll see,” responds the ultra-realist with a smile. “We’ll see what shakes out from it.”
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