WHAT A CHARACTER!
The crazy world of actress Lin Shaye — from hideous faces to supernatural scares
AT 74, character actress Lin Shaye is finally, and deservedly, taking the lead in the newest installment of the hit horror series “Insidious,” which began in 2011.
Shaye is not in touch with the ghost world in the way her “Insidious” character, the spirit medium Elise Rainier, is. But, she admits, “before we did the fourth one” —“The Last Key,” out Friday —“I had some weird stuff happen at my house.”
It started with drinking glasses. “They would just jump out of my hand,” she says. “In two days, I broke about four glasses. I would be holding one, and it would either drop or seem to be flipped out of myhand. Then I choked on a pill at 2 in the morning. I couldn’t breathe. And then I found maggots in my house, under this little wastebasket. There was nothing in it, no food.
“So I thought, ‘I’m calling my friend with the sage,’” she says, referring to the herb some people burn in their homes for positive vibes. “He came over and walked through the whole house. I’m not a fearful person, but I thought, ‘Just in case . . .’ ”
Shaye has worked steadily in supporting roles since the 1970s: She played a teacher in 1984’s “A Nightmare on Elm Street” and has popped up in assorted so-bad-they’re-good movies, including “Snakes on a Plane.” But you’re most likely to recognize her from her work in horror and comedy — particularly the 1990s gross-out movies of the Farrelly brothers. The Detroit-born actress, who now lives in Los Angeles, points out that she’s a highly trained dramatist: “I’m a serious actor, I really am. I studied with Uta Hagen and Stella Adler, worked with [famed Method-acting teacher] Lee Strasberg. I take my craft very seriously.” But she made a big splash playing cartoonishly hideous middle-aged women in the comedies “Kingpin” and “There’s Something About Mary.” And, she adds, she fought for those roles.
The brothers didn’t want to see Shaye for the “Kingpin” part, described as the “angriest, ugliest woman God ever let loose on the planet.” But she loved it.
So Shaye assembled a look the Farrellys wouldn’t forget. “I had fake eyelashes coming out of my nostrils. I put egg all over my face to make it wrinkly. I put oil in my hair. I came in for the audition, and a friend walked by me three times before I said, ‘Hey, it’s Lin!’ He said, ‘Oh, my God! I thought you were off the street.’”
She got the part — a repellent landlady who exacts payment from Woody Harrelson’s character in the form of sex — and says it remains her favorite role. “And I really made it happen. It empowers me to be able to go, ‘I’m not gonna stop. I’m gonna go after it.’ ”
For her follow-up, she played Cameron Diaz’s character’s roommate in “There’s Something About Mary,” a woman with ridiculously sagging breasts and a leatherlike tan. “I still have the boobs,” she says with a laugh.
Lately, she’s appeared in many a horror movie as the wise older woman. Some are scarier than others; “Insidious” is near the top of the freakout list. In 2010, at the beginning of the series, director James Wan gave her a script.
“I read it in bed, and it was so scary I literally locked it in a closet downstairs,” she says. “I just thought, “‘I really don’t want to have this next to me when I go to sleep.’”
Still, Shaye’s a proponent of getting spooked now and again. “Fear is a powerful emotion,” she says, “especially in a theater with a bunch of strangers. People try to hide it to appear strong, but there you’re in a safe place where you can scream and howl and express all that. And then go home to your warm, safe bed!”