The movie that scarred Elizabeth Debicki for life: “Well, I’ll never recover from that”
Quite recently, there have been a few examples of actors showing their hypocrisy by making incredibly scary stuff and then coming out and telling us they’d never watch anything like it themselves, which is unfair, really; they should be made to sit and suffer like the rest of us. There was Sadie Sink and Stranger Things for one, and you can add The Night Manager star Elizabeth Debicki to the list as well.
Putting aside my plan that any actor who makes a film that scares me should be made to watch one themselves, A Clockwork Orange style, in some kind of barter system for one moment, Debicki apparently is not a fan at all of horror movies due to an unsettling experience back when she was a teen.
After filming the bloody Ti West trilogy-closer MaXXXine with Mia Goth in 2024, Debicki told People: “I think my horror-watching days ended one day when I was watching – I can’t remember [which movie] – with my best friend. We were like 16 and her dad, classic, went around the house and knocked on the window and scared the shit out of us.”
Which is great banter, obviously, but not really enough to never watch a horror movie ever again; in order to manage that, you’d need something genuinely, upsettingly disturbing, which right on queue, Ari Aster delivered back in 2018.
Continuing to explain her fear of scary flicks, Debicki added, “I don’t seek them out. And if someone’s like, ‘Let’s watch this,’ I’m like, ‘Absolutely not.’ I watched Hereditary and I was like, ‘Well, I’ll never recover from that.'”
OK, to give Debicki some credit here, Hereditary is a very, very upsetting film; the kind of film that even years later you think back on watching with a sense of ‘yeah that was deeply odd’ crawling back over your memories, the kind that makes you want to go back and watch it again immediately but also never to do that, ever.
Now regarded as one of the finest horror movies of all time, Aster’s debut directorial effort is not just effective as a horror in terms of fearsome visuals, but also picks at the terrifyingly paralysing traits that can be passed down from generation to generation in any family, from alcoholism to anxiety, making the story all too relatable for many of us.
It won a host of awards on release, as well as becoming one of A24’s biggest ever movies on its first time of asking. On a budget of just $10m, it brought in almost $100m at the box office, while Toni Collette’s performance as the bereaved mother Annie went down as one of the greats, up there with Shelley Duvall in The Shining or Essie Davis in 2014’s The Babadook, a film that Debicki did see and acknowledged as “remarkable”.
As for Debicki, she has a big year coming up thanks to two major new releases. The first of them is Wicker, a fantasy film starring Olivia Colman and Alexander Skarsgard about a woman in a seaside village who is teased mercilessly by others, leading her to build herself a boyfriend out of wicker. And secondly, there is the much-awaited new film from David Fincher, The Adventures of Cliff Booth.
That one stars Brad Pitt and is a spin-off of Quentin Tarantino’s 2019 film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Tarantino has again written the screenplay, which features Debicki in a leading role alongside Carla Gugino and Timothy Olyphant.
