How Maika Monroe, star of “Longlegs,” became the defining horror actor of our terrifying times.
Maika Monroe poses for a portrait in Santa Monica, CA on June 19, 2024. She has been restrained in a basement, chased through a house of terrors, strangled in a dream, imprisoned in a cocoon, drowned by her own hand. But Monroe had never felt real fright while making a horror movie — and she’s starred in a lot of them.The superlatively spooky serial-killer flick filmed in the winter of 2023 in Vancouver, pairing Monroe with Nicolas Cage as a villain so shocking he’s not even in the trailer.
The film follows Monroe’s FBI agent Lee Harker, a recruit whose intuitive talents get her assigned to an unsolved case. As she investigates a string of family murder-suicides, she unearths a close connection to the primary suspect, a haunting figure from her own past whose coded crime-scene notes and calling card —Even the script made her uneasy, in the right way.
“It all comes from her ability to internalize her performance,” says “The Guest” director Adam Wingard. “What makes an interesting scream queen is when you feel like there’s a depth of soul behind an actor’s eyes. I think she has that in spades.”Monroe’s father, a construction worker by trade, introduced her to genre classics like “A Nightmare on Elm Street” and “The Shining” when she was a preteen in Santa Barbara, Calif.
Monroe returned to Los Angeles to try acting again, soon landing a breakout role in “The Guest” as a 20-year-old live-at-home waitress who gradually suspects her brother’s ex-military friend is a killer. Wingard, the movie’s director, had written her character as more of a tomboy, but her audition persuaded him to tailor the part around her deadpan vibe. “It’s not easy to be a character that’s very sarcastic and checked out and still seems likable and engaging,” he says.
audition tape, which highlighted her “electric noodle presence in person,” he says, and her diametrically opposed “extremely serious presence on camera.” The difference was so stark that he had a difficult time wrapping his mind around her modes. “The distance between those two points is just filled with fascination and wonder and mystery and power,” he adds. “You’re kind of a fool not to take on that kind of power.
To get into those darker spaces, Monroe has often mined her personal history, aiming to draw from something real and human from her life as long as it fits within her character. “In the horror genre, I try to ground insane situations from the most human feelings,” Monroe says. “It absolutely is tapping into my own traumas, my darkest moments, to try and bring the most vulnerable emotion to the role.
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