Amy Madigan could use a small respite from the overwhelming (and unexpected) attention she’s received for her performance as flamboyantly stylish villainess Aunt Gladys in the summer horror sensation “Weapons.”
“I haven’t done this in a while, so it feels like a new experience for me, but I know what it is very well,” she says of the numerous interview requests and growing awards buzz. “It’s a little daunting at times, you know. I’ll be honest with you about it.”
Under brightly colored clothing, a red wig, prosthetics and unsubtle makeup, Madigan, 75, transformed into an enigmatic woman who arrives to stay with her niece’s family just before an entire class of elementary school children vanishes without explanation.
As it turns out, Gladys, avid in the occult, is keeping those kids in a trance to drain them of their energy and stay alive. “She’s just a girl trying to get through life, and she’s gotta do what she needs to do,” Madigan says with a light chuckle.
“She’s confident and glorious in her existence on this planet, and on her forward motion of, ‘I’m really a nice person. I just have to do these things,’” Madigan says. “Well, she doesn’t do them, she has other people do things for her. It’s an interesting path that she has chosen.”
And what of Gladys’ mysterious backstory? “People will ask me certain questions about her, and I prefer not to answer them because that was my own personal work,” she says.
Zach Cregger, the writer-director of “Weapons,” offered Madigan the role after meeting her for the first time over lunch. The straightforwardness of the process surprised her, but Madigan is now convinced she was the ideal actor to embody Gladys.
“There’s an amount of physicality and physical humor in it, and I have always done that in almost all the things I have done,” she explains. “I enjoy that and that’s just a part of who I was as a kid, and I’m still that person.”
The veteran actor only used a stunt double for her very last scene, in which the entranced children attack Gladys. But the lead-up to that undoing was all Madigan. “I did all that running and all that ridiculous stuff,” she says. “I think everybody was holding their breath a little bit going, ‘Oh, I hope she doesn’t slip and crash into something,’ which I didn’t. I’m proud of that.”
Aunt Gladys’ singular look came together from a process of trial and error with costume designer Trish Summerville, special makeup effects designer Jason Collins and Cregger. The result, Madigan says, is a woman with “a certain joie de vivre about her,” who doesn’t care about what others think of her.
“You gotta bring yourself to anything that you are really delving into,” she says. “I’m finally bringing it to Gladys and Gladys accepted me, so that’s nice.” The unabashed, idiosyncratic freedom that Gladys exudes is likely part of what has endeared her to audiences.
“She’s certainly been embraced by the gay community, the drag community, and the trans community,” Madigan says. “That’s a big surprise that makes me feel just personally wonderful, considering what’s going on politically right now.”
Horror fans have also fallen for Gladys: Madigan experienced a taste of their fervor at the movie’s premiere at the United Theater in downtown L.A. this summer.
“They hadn’t seen the film yet, but they were already out there, and they wanted to talk to me,” she recalls. “I have to thank them because they really pushed the conversation a lot about this.”
Though she doesn’t keep up with recent horror, Madigan recalls watching black-and-white midnight movies growing up in Chicago with her brother: “I was very versed in all the Frankensteins and the Nosferatus and things like that,” she says.
The industry’s positive reception of her performance in “Weapons” isn’t Madigan’s first brush with awards attention. For her role as a young woman in conflict with her headstrong father in 1985’s “Twice in a Lifetime,” Madigan received an Oscar nomination for supporting actress.
But as she’s quick to point out, awards season is a much more intense experience than it was 40 years ago.
“It wasn’t like that. No one was calling me up or the people I worked with and saying, ‘We really need to talk to Amy Madigan, her performance, we really liked it.’ That did not happen then,” she explains. “There was no social media, of course. I went to Neiman Marcus and bought a dress and went, ‘I hope this is fancy enough. I hope this is good enough.’”
Campaigning, for Madigan, is the antithesis to what she does. Often seen in independent productions and on theater stages, “Weapons” is the first “big film” she’s done in a while. Still, she’s willing to see where the ride takes her.
“If this can put me in some conversations for the business side, which says yes or no to making films, or if different filmmakers who wouldn’t think of me now do, then that’s exciting,” she says. “Perhaps I could do something really fun next year, but nothing’s real till it’s real.”
Just don’t pigeonhole her. “Now, if someone wanted me to play a character that was kind of the mirror of Gladys or that same person, I would not be interested,” she adds.
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