For Summer H. Howell, Carrie White’s turning point comes during a shooter drill.
In Mike Flanagan’s Prime Video adaptation of Carrie, Howell plays the title character opposite Samantha Sloyan as her mother, Margaret, after the two have spent 15 years in isolation. Howell and Sloyan spoke with BLK Cinema about the moment Carrie starts to see the world clearly, why Sloyan understands Margaret’s fear and the bloody finale.
Summer H. Howell on Carrie’s turning point
Asked when Carrie shifts from wide-eyed wonder to understanding the world around her, Howell pointed to her first days at school.
“I think it happens pretty soon, like the metal detector, but then the shooter drill,” Howell said. “The shooter drill, I think, is the turning point, talking to Principal Grayle and hearing how it’s just normal, and then going home and confronting her mom for the first time probably ever. Big turning point.”
The drill echoes what Flanagan previously told BLK Cinema scared him most while developing the series: the normalization of shooter drills in schools.
Samantha Sloyan on seeing the world through Margaret’s eyes
Sloyan said Margaret’s outlook comes from returning to a world she’s been cut off from as long as Carrie has.
“Margaret has been isolated just as long as Carrie has. So it’s 15 years. And so I think about what it would be like for me to walk into this world missing 15 years,” Sloyan said. “Let’s take the shooter drill thing, right? Looking at that from the outside, as somebody who hasn’t been, they say like boiling a frog, slowly gotten used to it, with fresh eyes, to see how many of the things we’ve normalized are actually kind of terrifying, and bringing attention to, hey, we should actually change that instead of getting used to that. I think that that’s what I recognized in Margaret’s push for that.”
She said the speed of change in her own lifetime informed the performance.
“It’s amazing to see how many things have changed in such a short period of time. It can terrify me. And so I really played on that with Margaret, of just being afraid of the world sometimes,” Sloyan said. “Instead of, like Carrie, embracing it with curiosity and interest, Margaret’s just like, no, this is all wrong. But I can understand that.”
Summer H. Howell on the ‘Carrie’ finale
Asked about a favorite sequence from the blood-soaked eighth episode, Howell singled out what happens after the prom.
“I was going to say the car scene, and then after, how all of a sudden I’m dancing in the street. You’re like, oh no. That is horrifying in itself, just the immediate switch,” Howell said. “Filming all that was really fun, as awful as it looked.”
Carrie Season 1 is now streaming on Prime Video.
Featured image photo credit: Prime Video
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