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Not too long after the opening weekend of Weapons, director Zach Cregger was on the European set of his next film, a reboot of the Resident Evil franchise. Still, he felt compelled to send a text to his Weapons star Amy Madigan.
“He goes, ‘Do you have any idea what’s going on?’” Madigan tells me. “I said, ‘No, what?’ I thought there was bad news or something.”
It was, instead, just about the best news imaginable. Not only was Weapons a hit, on its way to a $270 million global gross, but Madigan’s villainous character, Aunt Gladys — who uses unspecified dark magic to ensorcell the children in a small town, causing great violence and panic — was a phenomenon. Madigan, 75, was barely glimpsed in the film’s marketing, and she attended the film’s premiere more or less incognito. (“Some people didn’t know it was me, which was the ultimate compliment,” she tells me.) And yet it didn’t take long at all for Gladys — with her red wig, over-the-top makeup and witchy rituals — to take on a life of her own, inspiring countless Halloween costumes and, for Madigan, a thrilling new chapter in a more than 40-year acting career that began in the early 1980s in movies like Love Child, The Day After and Places in the Heart.
“ Playing Gladys was completely freeing to me,” says Madigan, who won the best supporting actress award from the New York Film Critics Circle and has earned Golden Globe and Critics Choice nominations for the role as well. “I didn’t have to worry about societal viewpoints of what women look like or how people view you. Gladys thinks she’s great and perfect and wonderful, and when I had my whole drag on, it was just very freeing and very confident. That was really a gift for me.”
It’s not Madigan’s first go-round with awards attention. Just a few years into her career, the Chicago-born actress earned an Oscar nomination for her supporting turn in the 1985 family drama Twice in a Lifetime; she’s also appeared in Oscar-nominated films like Field of Dreams and Pollock, the latter directed by her husband, Ed Harris. As juicy roles became harder to find, as so often happens for women further along in their careers, it was Harris who encouraged her to hang in there for the right thing to come along.
“When I was having my lean years, he was very clear about it,” Madigan tells me on this week’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast. “He kept saying, ‘Just you wait. You are ready, and something’s gonna happen to you.’”
She’s not giving Harris credit for having psychic powers — not yet, at least — but he clearly was on to something, with Weapons introducing a whole new generation to Madigan’s captivating screen presence (yes, even under all that makeup).
The episode also includes a conversation between me, Christopher Rosen and Richard Rushfield discussing our respective top 10 films of the year, with some hearty debate about megahits Sinners and One Battle After Another, and everyone making the case for at least one favorite that may have flown under your radar.
Happy New Year to you all, and check back on Saturday for another bonus interview episode of this podcast. Prestige Junkie After Party will also be back on Friday with a year-in-review episode you absolutely won’t want to miss. See you there!
