In the Envelope: The Actor’s Podcast features in-depth conversations with today’s most noteworthy actors and creators. Join host and senior editor Vinnie Mancuso for this guide to living the creative life from those who are doing it every day.
There’s something ironic about the fact that many horror fans first met Kate Siegel in the 2016 feature “Hush,” where she delivered a stunning, mostly wordless performance as a deaf writer under siege by a masked maniac. Since then, the actor has delivered many words as the foremost performer of frequent collaborator and husband Mike Flanagan’s famously lengthy monologues. (See the “What happens after we die” meditation from “Midnight Mass” for the gold standard.) Siegel sat down with In the Envelope: The Actor’s Podcast on the eve of her guest-star appearance in found-footage series “The Creep Tapes” Season 3 (out Sept. 15 on Shudder and AMC+) to give a master class in lengthy dialogue scenes.
“I write it out without any punctuation, in my own handwriting, no stage directions, nothing, just straight dialogue. That’s the first way I get it into my body,” she says, drawing from her Shakespeare-heavy BFA track at Syracuse University. “Then I do it while I take a walk. I walk and I walk and I walk and I walk and I walk and I walk. I’m not even making choices, I’m just burying words in. Once it’s memorized, I could start it from any place. That’s the most tedious, boring part, and it has to be done.”
Once the homework portion of the process is done, it’s time to get creative. “Once I’ve put all the sand in the sandbox, I get to do the fun part, which is playing. I think of ridiculous things,” Siegel says. “I do it in a German accent. I do it like a lawyer. I do it like a child. What I’m trying to do is connect thought to word, so that no matter what happens on the day, I know [the character’s] thought process, but not the rhythm of speech.”
Siegel continues, “As we get closer to shooting, I start to prepare in the way you would if you were having a really important conversation. You’re not running lines. You’re thinking about what you’re trying to get out of this conversation. Even though the monologue is about what happens when we die, I’m just really thinking about it as a conversation between me and the person who’s listening. Then, on the day, I cross my fingers and jump off the bridge and see what happens.”
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