The Best Part of the New Carrie TV Series? Her Mom.

Jordan Rossi9 min readIf we’re talking strictly about personal experience, Samantha Sloyan is the wrong person to play the mother in Carrie.The Margaret White of Stephen King’s novel—and the way Sloyan portrays her in Mike Flanagan’s new TV adaptation—is fanatical, stifling, and merciless with her daughter. Comparatively, Sloyan’s own parents were … wonderful, tirelessly encouraging her acting passion and always pushing her to get out and make the most of the world.Sloyan also has innate nurturing instincts. She even takes me out to a playground, suggesting we meet for our interview at a park in Sherman Oaks where she played as a girl and still likes to visit to start her mornings. The picnic benches are often sticky with spilled juice or buttercream frosting from the many birthday parties held there, and the crows who lift off from the table as we approach leave behind their own mess too. But Sloyan is prepared: She brought towels in her tote bag for us to sit on.Sloyan is so empathetic that she even feels compassion for Margaret White, a notorious harridan who truly puts the “mother” in the word smother. “The more I have talked about Margaret, the more I really believe it’s just her heart slowly breaking the whole time,” Sloyan says. “Her whole world was Carrie, by her own doing.” She suspects something unspeakable happened to Margaret once upon a time, hardening her to the core. “She just doesn’t want whatever that was to happen to Carrie,” the actress says. “None of it is correct.”Liane HentscherSummer H. Howell as Carrie, hugging her mother, Margaret, played by Samantha Sloyan.This is why Sloyan is actually perfect for the role and the reason Flanagan was prepared to fight hard for her to play it: She humanizes one of King’s most infamous monsters, becoming the heart of the new Carrie series, even if it’s a fractured, imperfect, and malformed one. “From the first day, there was never another actor in my mind for Margaret White. It was always Sam Sloyan,” Flanagan tells me. “We looked at 1,400 actresses to find Summer H. Howell for Carrie. We only looked at one for Margaret.”Sloyan has now become part of a sisterhood: Piper Laurie got an Oscar nomination for playing Margaret White in Brian De Palma’s 1976 movie, and Patricia Clarkson was Carrie’s mom in the 2002 TV version, with Julianne Moore playing the role in the 2013 remake. Flanagan might have had endless casting choices had he not so firmly made up his mind from the get-go, and he expected Prime Video executives to push for a bigger name.“I thought it would be a struggle,” Flanagan says. “There were a lot of huge actresses who were interested in that role, but I was coming to Amazon saying, ‘This is for Samantha Sloyan.’ I thought we’d have to fight and prove that out. We recorded one scene, in the prayer closet where she’s standing behind Carrie. It was a self-tape and Sam just in close-up. I sent it to Amazon and I said to Sam, ‘All right, this is the first of a multistep process. There will be rounds of approvals and callbacks. We’ll try other scenes, there will be chemistry tests, all the things you go through.’ Amazon came back that night and said, ‘We’re good to go. Sam is approved to play Margaret White.’ ”In a word, Sloyan killed it. But that whole ordeal is another example of why she was ideal for the part. Sloyan is a shape-shifter—one of those actors who push themselves aside and vanish within a character, inhabiting it so fully that you forget you’re watching a performance. That’s why her name isn’t necessarily a household one, even though you have surely seen her before.She was devastating on The Pitt as Lily Bradley, the mother who fights against donating her teenage son’s organs even after he is deemed brain-dead from an overdose. She was Dr. Penny Blake on Grey’s Anatomy, whose fateful misjudgment cost “McDreamy” his life after his car crash. In the Flanagan universe, she was the comforting and unflappable Leigh Crain in The Haunting of Hill House, the vain and glamorous Tamerlane in The Fall of the House of Usher, the kindly dance teacher in The Life of Chuck, and the ruthlessly scheming church lady Bev Keane in Midnight Mass (the one fellow character Margaret White might actually commiserate with).“Just from my experience of being recognized from things here or there, when people recognize me from Mike’s stuff, it’s really very intimate,” Sloyan says. “There’s something that moves them about it and the way they talk about it. It’s not just scary.”Courtesy of NetflixSamantha Sloyan as Tamerlane Usher in The Fall of the House of Usher.But scary is certainly a part of it. In her self-tape audition, she summoned the requisite menace—and never let up, even though she also brought a new bittersweet twist to the character. “I was never worried that Margaret was going to be too kind or too likable, but I did want to make sure that she was dangerous enough to Carrie, that she was enough of a force that Carrie had to push against,” Sloyan says. “I wanted it to feel like Carrie had the same anxiety at home that she had in school—of not wanting to step out of place. Not feeling safe.”As the crows we evicted from the picnic table look on from the trees around us, Sloyan shakes her head and almost regretfully allows some judgment to emerge. “I think Carrie feels betrayed so many times by her mother. And her mom fails her,” she says. “I mean, Margaret fails her in many ways.” Sloyan brings up the infamous opening scene of the book, in which Carrie is baffled by her menstruation and is ridiculed by the other girls. “I mean, even with the period thing,” Sloyan says, “she was really unable to help her daughter understand anything.”Rather than absolving Margaret, Sloyan at least makes her motivations knowable. When I ask if she has ever known oppressively controlling parents, she says, “Not having kids, anything that I see I take with a grain of salt. I can’t personally understand the pressures of raising a kid right now. So I give people a wide berth.”Then she glances around the busy park, toward the fields where she played softball and soccer as a kid and the fading concrete path through the trees that was once a Yellow Brick Road that wound through a Wizard of Oz playground, now removed. “I do know just from my experience being here, I don’t know…” she shrugs. “We were just given a lot more autonomy. I understand that that’s not always just a choice people can make. But I don’t know what it would be like to not have had that.”When our talk turns to her own parents, tears well in Sloyan’s eyes, and she wipes them away hastily. “I’m sorry. I apologize,” she says, struggling to get the words out. “We lost my dad last month. I would like to talk about this, but … forgive me.”Her dad was James Sloyan, a longtime character actor best remembered for being the double-crosser Robert Redford cons in the opening of The Sting. “One of the great joys of my life is that I’m also a big lover of late-’70s to mid-’90s television, which just so happens to be the hot spot for my family,” Sloyan says, brightening considerably. “There have been so many times I’ll be watching a Murder, She Wrote, and it’s fun because he was on that a handful of times. I’ll get screenshots from my friends who are like, ‘I’m watching The Love Boat and here’s your dad!’ ”Her mom is Deirdre Lenihan, a fellow character player who appeared on The Waltons and the early-’70s fashion sitcom Needles & Pins. “I’m a very different person than my mother, but we know each other intimately and are friends and have a great relationship, but we don’t walk through the world in the same way,” Sloyan says.There was something useful there for Margaret but only in contrast. “I used the only thing I could, which is my understanding of what it is to be a daughter in a mother-daughter relationship,” Sloyan says. “Part of maintaining a great relationship with my mom is understanding that she’s a whole other person and that her life isn’t only my mom, that she’s a woman with experiences.”One of the tragedies of Margaret and Carrie is that neither can let down her guard enough to see that in the other.While the major story beats in the Carrie series are mostly the same as in the book and previous adaptations, the way Sloyan plays the mother is radically different from the way Laurie did it. Laurie’s Margaret White hates her daughter, regarding her as a cursed reminder of a long-ago carnal sin. Sloyan’s Margaret is just as oppressive and controlling, but there’s no question she loves Carrie. Loves her too much.“That is a fundamental difference of Mike’s story. It’s not that Piper Laurie’s Margaret is misunderstood. She’s not. She’s very clear,” Sloyan says. Her version of Margaret uses love to rationalize her harm and abuse. “She fails her daughter due to her lack of flexibility,” Sloyan says. “She isn’t doing that parental thing, which is putting the child before yourself. She seems to be incapable of doing that. … That happens a lot with parents, right? You love your kid so tightly in a moment where they really need you to step back.”Robert FalconerSamantha Sloyan as Margaret White in Carrie, taking a moment for prayer.Sloyan’s real-life parents were the opposite. They not only gave her freedom but literally cheered for her along the way, attending every play and celebrating every TV role, even if it was just a commercial for the Jurassic Park ride at Universal Studios. (She rode it 15 times for that job. “For the first handful everybody was like, ‘This is great!’ And then at the end it was just all of us sitting silently until the drop,” she says.)Her family was from the blue-collar side of Hollywood, more than the world of red carpets and multimillion-dollar paydays. Sloyan says she was lucky to grow up “never having your parents ask you when you’re going to get a real job.”Her own career was a slow burn. Even advertising work was tough to land. “I didn’t get them a lot. The people who excelled in the commercial world were the improv actors, people who were kind of easy and fun to be around and knew where the joke was,” she says. “I was very serious and didn’t understand. When [the casting agents] were like, ‘Tell us a little about your weekend,’ I’d be like, ‘I’m doing a play about traumatized veterans.’ And they’re like, ‘No, kid. Don’t tell us literally what you did this weekend. Just be engaging.’ ”She honed her skills in acting classes, which is where she met Kate Siegel, another Flanagan regular, who is also married to the filmmaker. They first acted onscreen together in Flanagan’s 2016 thriller Hush, with Sloyan playing her friend and neighbor who is brutally murdered onscreen by John Gallagher Jr.’s stalker character.Sloyan absolutely loves dying. She proudly pulls up a behind-the-scenes video from the making of The Fall of the House of Usher, in which she is clad in an elegant green gown and dropping from a height of about three stories (while actually attached to safety wires, of course). In that sense, maybe those 15 drops on the Jurassic Park ride were a kind of acting school itself. “I get so excited, and then the second I’m up there, I’m like, ‘Should I have reconsidered this? Is this safe?’ And the answer is yes,” Sloyan says.Jordan RossiShe has been killed so often in Flanagan’s films—often slain by Siegel herself—that people sometimes ask Sloyan: “Does Mike Flanagan actually like you?”“You could make the argument that I clearly hate Sam,” Flanagan says. “But no, I am in such awe of Samantha Sloyan as an actor. The thing that always amazes me about Sam is she doesn’t have ego onscreen or off. She’s one of the gentlest, kindest people I’ve ever met, but she can play the deepest, darkest monster you can ever imagine.”After we pack up our towels and surrender the picnic table back to the crows, Sloyan pulls on a blue Dodgers cap and walks with me back to my car on the other side of the park. As we say goodbye, a final thought occurs to her. She’s still raw from her father’s real-life passing, but as we talk about him a little further, she begins to laugh when she realizes that getting murdered onscreen is something else they shared.“On Moonlighting, I think he got electrocuted in a giant Coca-Cola sign at the end, which was traumatic, you might imagine,” she says. “But as a kid, I was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s so cool!’ ”For actors like them, dying dramatically is a kind of immortality.