Furthest thing from flannel
‘Schitt’s Creek’ actor gets a whole new look for horror series,
Emily Hampshire’s agent had one directive for her first post-“Schitt’s Creek” role: no plaid, no baggy jeans.
“And I think the furthest thing from that was a corset,” Hampshire said during a Zoom call. “She was very into me doing something the polar opposite.”
The plaid shirts and jeans were a quintessential part of Stevie Budd, the sarcastic motel manager in the beloved Canadian TV comedy about a rich family fallen on hard times, a role that won Hampshire six Canadian Screen Awards and a shared Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Comedy Series Ensemble.
On this day, Hampshire was looking very un-Stevie-like in a tailored white blazer, lilac eyeshadow and rosy lipstick. She was enthusiastically speaking about “Chapelwaite,” the TV horror series in which she stars — and not just stars, but gets second billing to Academy Award winner Adrien Brody, who plays whaling captain Charles Boone.
Hampshire, 39, plays a character who wasn’t in “Jerusalem’s Lot,” the Stephen King short story on which “Chapelwaite” is based: aspiring writer Rebecca Morgan, who becomes governess to widower Boone’s three children after he brings them to his family’s creepy ancestral home in Maine.
The Montreal native isn’t the first “Schitt’s Creek” actor to do something diametrically opposed to their “Schitt’s” character as a followup role. Annie Murphy, who played spoiled but big-hearted daughter Alexis on “Schitt’s,” made a splash earlier this year portraying a homicidally unhappy sitcom wife in the AMC dramedy “Kevin Can F**k Himself.”
To some extent, it seemed to Hampshire she was fated to play Rebecca.
“What’s crazy is that when this came to me, I had just sold my own show that I was going to be a writer on and I was reading Stephen King’s book ‘On Writing.’ And I couldn’t believe that this part of playing a writer was coming to me and I felt like — I don’t want to be this person — but the universe is telling me something.”
Rebecca “is so ahead of her time that even when I was meeting with the Filardi brothers, who wrote this, and Donald De Line, the producer, I was like, ‘Are you sure you’ve got the right person?’ … I never thought someone would think of me in this light,” Hampshire said. “And they were like, ‘We don’t want who you would think of for a role like this.’ They wanted a really modern Rebecca, which I love.”
Hampshire envisions the aspiring horror novel writer as “the female Stephen King,” if King was a woman in the 1850s. “I love how brave she is to go into this house, like she wants to go to the source of the story and get serious inspo.”
There are indeed lots of things that would put a less hardy female off the Chapelwaite house: strange noises behind the walls, a seriously scary basement that was the scene of a violent death, a family curse that might be afflicting Boone and, oh yes, undead visitors.
And then there are the folks in Preacher’s Corners who, superstitiously blaming the Boones for an illness that is killing some of the residents and looking askance at Charles’ half-Polynesian children, want to run the family out of town.
The tone of the show is classic gothic horror, but fears of a mysterious illness and mistrust of outsiders are certainly themes that anyone who’s lived through the COVID-19 pandemic can relate to.
Brody, 48, who’s done very little television in a movie career that includes becoming the youngest Best Actor Oscar winner at 29 for “The Pianist,” was drawn to those parallels.
“You want to have something that has some depth and some relevance,” he said in a separate Zoom call. “‘Chapelwaite’ touches on not being welcome because you’re different and being a parent and overwhelmed with … a potential mental condition that is this whole internal burden bubbling up … All of that’s really exciting stuff to work with and I think that makes for interesting drama.”
He grew up with movies like “Nightmare on Elm Street” that “are really going for the gore and the shock and awe.” While there’s some of that in “Chapelwaite,” “there’s an intention to delve a little deeper and represent life … we’re still gripped with very similar concerns and challenges as men and women.”
Not that Brody isn’t on board with the horror in “Chapelwaite.” As a fan of the work of King and Edgar Allan Poe, he called it a thrill to share that horror with viewers. “To unravel things and let the tension build, I think it’s fun to slowly entice and then drop a few really scary bombs along the way.”
For her part, Hampshire was all in. “I just love the esthetic of gothic horror,” she said.
“If I’m being very honest, the television I watch is murder documentaries. And the stuff I read is true crime,” she added. “And I am fascinated about the minds of those kinds of people … psychopaths and serial killers … I think there must be something wrong with me. But then, those are like the top things on Netflix. So the rest of the world has issues, too.” “Chapelwaite” debuts Sunday at 10 p.m. on CTV