Mary Elizabeth Winstead Loves Being a Scream Queen: ‘I’m Honored to Be Called a Queen of Any Kind’

Mary Elizabeth Winstead loves a good scream. “It’s always been something that has come easily for me. I love letting it out. It feels so good. It’s not something I’ve had to work on, but it is something I enjoy,” she tells StyleCaster. 

Her affinity for screaming makes sense. With more than a dozen horror and thriller movies under her belt, which has affectionately earned her the reputation as one of Hollywood’s most recognizable scream queens, Winstead knows a thing or two about what it’s like to fight for her life. Her newest venture into the genre is Hulu’s The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, a remake of the 1992 thriller of the same name, in which Winstead stars opposite fellow scream queen, Maika Monroe.

While the film is considered a remake of the 1992 version, the similarities are slim, other than the fact that they both center around two women with a shared past who reunite years later. In The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, Winstead plays Caitlyn Morales, a wife and a mother of two young children who hires Polly Murphy (Monroe), a woman she helped years earlier at her social worker job, as a nanny. All seems well until Caitlyn starts to slowly lose her mind as strange, unexplainable things start to happen within her family. As plot unravels, so does the backstory between Caitlyn and Polly as Caitlyn learns Polly’s true identity and how they really know each other. 

It’s incredibly cathartic to let it all out and scream and cry and claw and try to survive.

“I hadn’t seen the original, but I was very aware of what it meant and what that story was about, so I was very curious to see how they were going to update it,” Winstead says. “The idea of playing this mother being terrorized by a nanny. I thought could be so interesting. I was intrigued from the start, and then I read the script, and I was blown away by the look at the female characters. It came from such an empathetic and complex point of view, which I wasn’t really expecting.”

Ahead, Winstead breaks down the ending of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, what she really thinks about being called a scream queen, and the horror movie she would love to do a sequel to. 

You’re a mother in real life. How did that affect how you approach this role?

It just made it so easy to connect to Caitlyn. Thankfully, I don’t struggle in all the same ways that Caitlyn does. Motherhood doesn’t really come easily to her. She tries to present herself as though it does, but inside, she’s really struggling to figure out how to be a good mother and how to connect with her children. She sort of keeps coming up against these roadblocks, which ultimately has a lot to do with what’s inside of her and what she’s pushing down and repressing and not looking at until she can really be her true self and embrace that she’s not going to really be able to be the best mother she can be. Any mother can relate to that feeling of always wanting to be a better mother and sometimes feeling like you’re falling short. Even if we don’t all go through the same things to the extent that Caitlyn goes through, especially throughout the film, it’s something every parent can relate to at some level.

The last scene of Polly and Caitlyn together shows Caitlyn crying over Polly’s body after she just killed her. What was going through Caitlyn’s mind in that scene? 

It’s a very tragic moment, and it’s another thing I love about the film is that we’re not clapping and cheering for the villain being killed at the end. It’s actually incredibly sad. These two women have such a tragic past and this tragic connection with one another. And Caitlyn would never have wanted that to be the outcome for Polly or Rebecca with all that transpired when they were kids. If anything, she would have wanted to go back and save Polly from what she went through, and so she would have never wanted this to be the outcome. It’s everything coming out and letting out the truth about who she really is and what she really went through when she was young and facing that. 

Do you feel like there is a victim or a villain in this story?

I think they’re mirrors of one another. They’re two sides of the same coin. This is some backstory we created. It’s not in the film, but Caitlyn was able to move on and forward because she came from a background of wealth, and Polly did not. These are two sides of trauma, and somebody who has some support and is able to pick themselves up in some way, even if they’re still repressing what they’ve been through. And then someone who had no support at all and what that ultimately manifested into.

The movie ends with Emma telling Jody the same story Polly told her earlier in the movie about the can of tuna fish. What was the significance of that scene ending the movie?

It’s a real comment on generational trauma, and the idea that now this young girl has just witnessed all of this pain and violence, and how is that going to affect her going on? It’s more of a question to think about what is that going to be like for her? I think there’s still hope that she’ll be able to heal from it, and that it won’t go down the same route that it’s been down before, with turning into a life of pain and violence and things for herself. But it is like it’s putting that question in the air of that could be a possibility and that this story could be passed on to the next generation. 

We don’t see you as a blonde often. So what was the significance of the blonde hair?

I dyed my hair blonde, and then I had extensions, because the idea was to sort of make Micah and I look alike as much as possible, just for this great effect that [director] Michelle [Garza Cervera] came up with, which is that Polly and Caitlyn sort of switch roles by the end of the film. You see Caitlyn starting to look a lot more like Polly, and Polly’s starting to look a lot more like Caitlyn. You see at the very last scene, Polly is wearing a cashmere sweater, and she’s got her hair up in a French twist bun. And Caitlyn is raggedy and her hair is stringy, and she’s in a sweatshirt, so she looks more down on her luck, like Polly looked in the beginning. And Polly looks a lot more like she’s living her best life Caitlyn was at the beginning. That effect was beautiful, and that was something that Michelle wanted to have throughout the film.

I love characters who are survivors.

Did you like yourself as a blonde?

I did. I was so into it. I kept it for a long time. I’ve only recently gone back to brown because I was sort of like, “OK, I’m ready to feel like myself again.” But I kept the blonde for a good six months after we finished shooting, just because I thought, “I’m not blonde all the time. I might as well enjoy it while I can.”

You’ve been in many horror and thriller movies. What do you like about the genre? 

There’s a masochism element of loving being put through the ringer in some capacity. Because they’re always emotionally draining. I always want to go to the most real place, so that usually means, if my character is running for their life, that’s going to feel really real for me in the moment. I don’t know what it is about that that is so fun for me to play, but it’s incredibly cathartic to let it all out and scream and cry and claw and try to survive. I love characters who are survivors and in horror films, you really get to tap into that. And somebody like Caitlyn is someone who’s a real survivor, even if she’s often surviving in ways that are unhealthy by not really being her true self and creating this facade around herself. It’s still a survival mechanism.

What do you think about the scream queen title fans have bestowed on you?

I’m so honored to be called a queen of any kind. I love horror films. I couldn’t possibly not love being called that. It’s an absolute honor. I may be doing less horror films these days, so I don’t know if I’m still a scream queen, but I still dabble in it. I still enjoy it, so anyone who wants to call me that, I’ll happily take it. 

Is there a horror movie that you would want to revisit for a sequel?

10 Cloverfield Lane was so much fun to shoot. I’ve always thought that would be so fun to do a sequel to see where she is now, and what happened after that. At the time, we were always talking about it. And it felt like you could do a sequel that’s directly after. Is she off fighting aliens? What’s happening? I’m not sure if you were to do a sequel 10 years on what that would be, but it would be interesting.

It’s not a horror movie, but I’m sure Scott Pilgrim vs. the World comes up a lot as a movie fans will often ask you about. Did you expect that film to have the legacy it does now?

I always expected it to do well because it’s an incredible film. So it was a real surprise when it came out, and it wasn’t considered to have done well. In that moment, you go, “Wow, people didn’t see it.” You’re disappointed, and you move on to the next thing. So I don’t think in that moment, I was expecting it to be what it is now, but at the same time, I’m not surprised, because good art always finds a way and finds an audience, and it’s undeniably a great film. So it’s a really good testament that when you make great work, don’t worry about what happens. You don’t know right away if you’re in it for the long game. I love that it continues finding audiences.

Has your son seen anything you’ve been in yet?

He’s seen little snippets of Ahsoka, so he’s familiar with me green, but I feel like he might think that’s all I do. Just be green when I go to work. I would like to show him some other things. I’d like to show him Sky High, because that’s kind of the only family-friendly film I’ve really done. . Maybe soon he’ll be into that, but I don’t know. He might just find it odd that I’m in the movie, and he also might not really believe that it’s me because I’m so much younger.

Speaking of Ahsoka, is there anything you can say about the new season?

We just finished filming. We were working on it for six months in London and just wrapped a week and a half ago. I can say that I’m tired. So that’s a little hint that we were working hard on that. But it’s just incredibly fun, and it was so epic. I can’t wait for people to see it. It’s an incredibly ambitious season. So there’s a lot to see.

How does it compare to the first season?

It’s just much bigger in scope.  I can’t give any details away, really, but I was blown away by the scale of it. So I’m really looking forward to surprising people with that. It’s going to be really cool.

The Hand That Rocks the Cradle streams on Hulu.