“Mommy’s with the maggots now.” Actor Alyssa Sutherland immediately grabbed our attention as Ellie, in Deadite form, when she uttered this line in the Evil Dead Rise trailer.
The new entry in the beloved franchise, written and directed by Lee Cronin (The Hole in the Ground), arrives exclusively in theaters on April 21, 2023. Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise will relocate the familiar Deadite terror from a cabin in the woods to a Los Angeles high rise apartment building.
Alyssa Sutherland’s riveting performance as Deadite Ellie brings the chills. In a chat with Bloody Disgusting after Evil Dead Rise‘s world premiere at SXSW, Sutherland revealed the surprising inspiration behind this sadistically playful turn. The actor also explained why she gravitated toward comedy when unlocking her terrifying portrayal.
Sutherland told Bloody Disgusting, “There’s something really fucking sinister about someone laughing. So, even if I’m not actually laughing, if you are reading that someone’s getting off on your pain… disturbing you in that way… yeah, that’s creepy. I watched a lot of different performances of villains and monsters—a lot of obvious ones.
“I don’t know what made me think of The Mask. I think, honestly, it’s just a generational thing. I grew up in a time when every attention-deprived child was doing an Ace Ventura impression. That was just the age, and that’s what was out there. I don’t know what made it come to me, but I thought, ‘I feel like I’m just going to watch this, and I’m not going to tell Lee because that might freak him out,’ if I told him what I was watching as one of my reference points.”
Sutherland clarifies that she wasn’t seeking to emulate Jim Carrey‘s performance in the 1994 fantasy comedy but rather use it as a building block. The actor elaborates on how this steered her performance and gave her empathy for her very sadistic demon.
Sutherland explains, “It’s not so much like I want to bring that into my performance in a direct way. It was, ‘oh, look at how much fun that is.’ Because he has a line in that film, something like what The Mask does to someone; if you’re this in real life, then you’ll be like this when you put the mask on. I thought, ‘now, this is an interesting concept.’ Because you have to build a second character. I play two different characters in the film. How do I build this Deadite? What am I going to go through? I’m building a human that went through deep trauma and is no longer alive, but now they’re this weird entity that’s floating around. But what if they’ve been tortured because they haven’t been able to express themself, and they’re waiting for a body to get into? And then when they do, it’s like, ‘oh, thank God. Now I can get all of this out.’
“In a weird way, this is going to sound really fucked, but it gave me empathy for the Deadite. I said, ‘oh, poor Deadite, you need to have some fun.‘”
Sutherland continues, “You don’t want to do a one-note performance. When you’re given that, it’s easy to fall into the trap of just being like [growling, chomping noises]. I didn’t want to do that. I wanted it to be different, surprising; not know what would happen next, and have her be unpredictable. That gave me a range of stuff to play with.”
The post ‘Evil Dead Rise’ – Alyssa Sutherland Drew from Surprising Jim Carrey Movie for Deadite Performance [Interview] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.