The “intimidatingly disgusting” character Rebecca Ferguson “absolutely loved” playing
Denis Villeneuve’s Dune movies have elevated so many actors to the next level, and while the obvious candidate would be Timothée Chalamet, who proved many doubters wrong by excelling in the role of Paul Atreides, Rebecca Ferguson also made an impact that cannot be undersold.
As Lady Jessica, mother of Paul and later a prophetic figure on the planet Arrakis, Ferguson has one of the most interesting roles in the entire series. In a story that could so easily be dominated by powerful men, she makes it very clear how much of an influential player she is. She’d been a big star before, thanks to roles in The Greatest Showman and the Mission: Impossible franchise, but this part elevated her such that, now, she’s potentially in the running for the next James Bond villain, seemingly with the world at her feet.
When it comes to her personal favourite characters, though, the Swedish star has eyes for another. In an interview with journalist Antonia Nessen, Ferguson revealed that she had a great time starring in the 2019 movie Doctor Sleep.
“I absolutely loved playing Rose the Hat,” she said, “I found her sexy, cool, and obviously intimidatingly disgusting. Completely without boundaries, and all those elements made her a fun character to play. It was my first grown-up role in a sense. I had just played Morgana in The Kid Who Would Be King, a character that scares young children.
“But here, I’m supposed to scare the older audience and I found that quite difficult. I tried to find a nurturing and very normal side to Rose, to embrace the bits that made her ‘human’ because you know, all she really cared about was loving her gang equally as much as a mother cares for her child.”
Doctor Sleep is the follow-up to King’s wildly successful novel The Shining, which sees an adult Danny Torrance, played by Ewan McGregor, haunted by his childhood experiences in the Overlook Hotel, trying to confront his fears and put his trauma to rest. In this, he decides to revisit the scene of his father’s freakout all those years ago, and, as you can imagine, this doesn’t go well.
Ferguson’s Rose the Hat is the leader of the ‘True Knot’, a cult of vampires who feed on the energy emitted by people with psychic abilities, which puts poor Danny right in her crosshairs. Her performance is utterly undeniable as a purely evil and sadistic force of nature who zeroes in on vulnerable children for her own nefarious purposes. Critics were absolutely entranced by her, with almost every single review of the movie citing her as the highlight of the terror-filled ordeal.
King, who famously hated the 1980 movie adaptation of the first novel, was seemingly chuffed with what director Mike Flanagan was able to do with the sequel, and Ferguson’s excellent turn as Rose the Hat surely contributed to that opinion; it also helped that he didn’t have to deal with Stanley Kubrick this time around.
