MTV Geek Talks to Mary

MTV Geek: What attracted you to the role? What made you want to be Mary? 

Katharine Isabelle: I was sent the script and was given a just a very brief—like oh, it’s from identical twin sister writer-director horror filmmakers--I ended up reading the whole script, the whole 180 pages, on my Blackberry twice. I immediately got sucked in. Being Mary is a very unique character especially, you know, in film and as a female. You don’t often see women in film portrayed the way that Mary is. She has some redeemable qualities, like she’s not ever really nice to everybody, but you still really like her. You know, I think she smiled once. [Laughs]. She’s not the typical charming, sweet character—she’s dark, she’s weird, she’s funny. I don’t think they try at any point in the movie to force you to like her—you either do or you don’t. Without her having to be all sunshine-y and that was something that I found intriguing because as a woman, and a woman in film, there’s often a few stereotypes that you can fit into. To have a character that’s that unique and also with the script itself being so original and well-written and of course once I met the girls, we became instant best friends. So there’s no way I couldn’t [Laughs].

Geek: That’s kind of an interesting element to Mary. She’s in this weird place between being an exploitation character and also a victimized character, but she’s neither of those things really. She seems to own her experience pretty early on. What did you think about that? Just that ambiguity to her that’s not neither here nor there. She’s not out for revenge exactly, she’s not out for… 

Isabelle: Well exactly, she’s pissed that she allowed herself to be, sort of and somewhat, victimized. That’s why it’s hard to describe the movie in general. It’s being marketed simply as the horror movie, and I’m like “Well it’s not really a horror movie. There’s no scary scenes.” There’s nothing really all that gory and there are some horrific elements definitely to it—but it’s the same thing with Mary. It’s hard to describe her as as a revenge character, or the movie a revenge story or any of those things—and that’s what I think is really intriguing. She doesn’t easily fit into a box. It’s rare to find characters like that these days in film. So I mean obviously it was something that I was thrilled to find [Laughs].

Read the whole interview here.

-Sylv