Alicia Witt recounts emotional moments

[This story contains spoilers for Longlegs.]

No one has had a career as brilliant as Alicia Witt. From her revenge against House Atreides at the age of eight in David Lynch’s film Dune for her remarkable role as Ruth Harker in Osgood “Oz” Perkins Long legsWitt has been a prolific performer in film and television for four decades, while also maintaining an accomplished musical career.

Long legs came to Witt about a year after suffering the double tragic loss of his parents in December 2021. This was the same year she also battled a cancer diagnosis, and eventually overcame it. So with this unimaginable context in mind, a number of actors, understandably, wouldn’t have entertained the idea of ​​playing a single mother who wipes out entire families in order to please the devil and protect her own daughter in the process. But, oddly enough, Witt found the whole experience cathartic, having learned long ago to shield herself from dark content.

She also connected with Perkins on their first Zoom call, and she believes their shared trauma of losing loved ones in high-profile ways made them kindred spirits in a way. (Perkins lost her father, Anthony Perkins, in 1992 to AIDS-related causes. Her mother, Berry Berenson, was also a 9/11 victim on American Airlines Flight 11.)

“The fact that Oz and I both had the shared experience of losing both of our parents in a grotesque and publicly known way, I’m sure I’ll never meet another person who has had that experience,” Witt says. The Hollywood Reporter“I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. It’s brutal and cruel, and it takes away the normal way a person would grieve something like that. So that was something we had in common, but [Longlegs] “It was a really cathartic experience overall.”

Surprisingly, Witt’s hardest day Long legs It’s not the climactic birthday party scene where her daughter, FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), made the impossible choice to end her mother’s life. Rather, it’s a moment that was cut in the edit. When Lee realizes that her mother, Ruth, is Longlegs’ (Nicolas Cage) accomplice, she goes home to confront her, and it’s there that she witnesses Ruth, the FBI colleague who accompanied her, being murdered. Gun in hand, Lee then heads to the backyard where Ruth shoots Lee’s personalized doll that Longlegs had imbued with satanic energy two decades prior. The explosion simultaneously seems to release a dark energy from Lee, causing her to pass out in response. She then wakes up in Longlegs’ basement, in her childhood home, while Ruth is away finishing two decades of the devil’s work at Ruby Carter’s birthday party.

In the original version of the scene that was scripted and shot, it appears that the doll being smashed by the shotgun was not the cause of Lee’s unconsciousness. Instead, Witt, who has…