Horror: She’ll have ‘nun’ of it
Taissa Farmiga is no fan of horror. Too bad the genre adores her. The 24year-old actress has appeared in several seasons of FX’s “American Horror Story,” the scary movie “The Final Girls” and now “The Nun” — the latest entry in the “Conjuring” series, out Friday.
“It might be a case of opposites attract,” Farmiga tells The Post. “Because I do not love watching horror films at all.”
Even seeing her own movie “The Nun,” in which she plays a demon-hunting novice named Sister Irene, was terrifying. “The beginning of the movie is kind of dark because it’s at night and it’s indoors,” says Farmiga, who saw it in a private room. “The people who were screening it for us, they left and walked out the doors. And all of a sudden, I panic.”
Filming a frightening flick, it turns out, is more fun than watching one. On set, “the material is so dark and heavy [that] the atmosphere as soon as they call ‘cut!’ is so much lighter,” she says. “Everyone is more relaxed and making jokes.”
Her sister act in “The Nun” is also another kind of sister act. Taissa is the younger sibling of Vera Farmiga, who plays a paranormal investigator in the first two “Conjuring” films. Vera doesn’t appear in “The Nun,” and Taissa was nervous about headlining. Yet once she arrived at the set in Romania, the New Jersey native says, it almost felt like her living room. “It was kind of like walking into a family setting,” she says. “Vera’s so close with [writer/producer] James Wan and the producer Peter [Safran]. It just felt very comfortable.”
Though “The Nun” exists in the same universe as the “Conjuring” films, it’s not a sequel. Since Vera’s character isn’t there, Taissa was free to make the movie her own, which involved learning the tiniest habits of nuns. “It’s not only about doing your daily prayers . . . it’s a minute-by-minute struggle for self-perfection.” She learned to avoid eye contact and refrain from trivial conversation.
The actress didn’t encounter any ghosts. She refused to. “I actively chose to shut myself off from the possibility of that,” she says. “Because I don’t know what I believe. I don’t know what’s out there. I feel like there could be things. But if I don’t open the door and let them in, they won’t bother me.”