"There's a moment where I was like, 'You know, Elijah Wood might murder me right now,'" says Megan Duffy, sitting across from me sipping a latte on a bright Los Angeles day. The birds are chirping, the sun is beaming, and we're talking about Megan getting choked out and fake-scalped.
Megan plays one of the victims in the horror film Maniac, arriving in select theaters and on VOD today. The film is all about a brutal serial killer (Elijah Wood) who preys on the women of Los Angeles, carving a path of terror through the night. For several creepy reasons, he is obsessed with mannequins, and spends the day restoring them while living at the storefront where he displays and sells his wares. At night, though, he goes on the hunt, not just to kill women, but to claim their scalps to put on his mannequins. Read IGN's review of Maniac here.
Admittedly, it's not the airiest of premises for a movie. This vision, told from the killer's perspective for most of the film, is a bloody and sometimes revolting look at obsession in its basest form. As you might expect, many victims are claimed by the killer's blade. One particularly brutal sequence involves the scalping and killing of Lucy (played by Duffy), a woman that the killer Frank met through an online dating service. The two flirt and start to make out, and then... well... bad things transpire.
So how does it feel to be the victim of one of recent cinema's most horrific death sequences? We asked the expert: Megan Duffy.
IGN: There's obviously a huge disparity between what's going on onscreen and what's going on behind the scenes, so walk me through the big scene, the scalping. Elijah Wood scalps you. How did that experience play out? What was that day like?
Megan Duffy: I nicknamed it "naked day." It was in my calendar. When I got my schedule, I put it in my calendar as naked day.
IGN: Only one day?
Duffy: Everything that takes place in Lucy's apartment was done in one 18-hour day. At the end I was exhausted. But luckily for me it was my third day on set, so I had gotten a chance to get to know everybody and feel comfortable.
Each day for me started off with three hours of hair and makeup, because we had to put all the tattoos on. So the first thing we did shooting-wise that day was the part where I'm dead on the bed. And then we went right into the scalping because it takes the most time, and that's really why we're all there, and the rest of it doesn't matter quite so much. So we did that first and then I had my head washed and my makeup reapplied and we went back and shot the beginning of that scene, right up to the murder.
IGN: This whole movie plays out in the killer's perspective—Elijah's perspective. How was that? Was he wearing the camera himself and operating it?
Duffy: Usually the DP [director of photography] Maxim was the one who was operating the camera. I think when I was being scalped, Elijah was wearing the camera rig but when we were walking around the apartment, I think the intention was that Elijah would wear the rig, but he's not a DP, so I don't think he knows how to pull focus or anything like that. So Maxim wears the rig. Maxim the DP's the one who squeezes my boobs. But there's a moment when I hand a jacket over, and I hand it to the real Elijah.
IGN: Interesting. So was he hanging out over the DP's shoulder?
Duffy: He's basically glued to him, yeah. In a lot of scenes, like the restaurant scene, it's Elijah who's sitting in the booth with me, right next to the camera, and then on the other side of him is Steven his double. So if I needed to interact with Elijah's right hand, then I would interact with Steven's right hand, and the left hand would be Elijah.
IGN: I always think about the artifice of acting and you have to draw on whatever you can, because in a scene like that, it's not like you're set back from the camera. The camera is right in your face and you're interacting with two different peoples' hands…
Duffy: Well, luckily for me, I'm super vain, so looking at my reflection while I was talking wasn't so much of a problem, [Laughs] Also, I come from doing commercials. I've done something like 40 commercials, and so many of them you deliver you lines into camera… It's a little weird to be having a conversation with someone but not being able to look at them, and I think acting is about communicating, so communicating with someone without actually being able to communicate was just a very strange thing, and I definitely slipped a couple of times and would steal a look.
IGN: So 18 hours on that set; how grueling was it? How many takes did you have to do of the actual choking and scalping?
Duffy: I would say maybe six, seven takes for everything, especially that day. We had the location one day and had to get it all in, so we'd just kind of do it until Frank was happy, which luckily was anywhere from five to seven times.
IGN: So he's not Stanley Kubrick… he's not making you sit there for three days.
Duffy: No, no. Thank goodness. I think I was choked like six or seven times, you know, to different degrees.
IGN: Were you ever like, "Hey, man! There's actual choking going on here!"?
Duffy: The take that they used in the film was the one where—you know, I'm fighting for my life—there's a moment where I was like, "You know, Elijah Wood might murder me right now." Not on purpose, obviously. But there was a moment where I was like, "If they don't yell cut soon, I'm gonna pass out." Luckily, they did before that happened.
IGN: How do you psych up for this: doing a very intense scene, but also having to do it exposed?
Duffy: I worked out a whole lot beforehand. I have a trainer, her name is Maria Martin. She is amazing, So we did lots of ab work. My abs look pretty good.
But it was also just the character work. Who Lucy is as a person is very different from me as a person. Every time I got a boyfriend, I was in bed by midnight every night, I didn't really go to bars anymore. So what I started doing was going out, and I met a girl who is a bartender and is covered in tattoos, and [we] talked about, "What's it like?" I stayed up late a couple of nights to see what it felt like at 4:00 in the morning when everything's kind of dark and you're walking by yourself. I did all that kind of stuff just to put myself in what I thought Lucy's mindset would be.
IGN: Obviously, seeing it play out, it gets pretty ridiculously violent. Was it weird seeing yourself in that setting, seeing yourself in those final sequences?
Duffy: I think it kind of makes me giggle a little bit. To me, it's silly because I was there and I know nothing bad happened to me and I was treated really nicely... even though the film is something that people believe to be really misogynistic. I don't know that it's a misogynistic film so much as it’s about a misogynist.
But I was treated really nicely. The crew was lovely to me. There were blankets when I needed them. There was a grip plugging in a heater between takes so that my toes would stay warm. Things like that. I was treated really nicely, so to see what it ended up looking like just makes me giggle a little bit, because it just wasn't actually happening.
Megan Duffy, not covered in blood. | Photo by: Cherie Roberts
IGN: Is there anyone in your life that is forbidden from seeing this?
Duffy: I keep telling my mom she isn't going to like it, and her response is always, "But I know you're really alive." And I'm like, "No, I really don't think you're going to want to see it," and I explain to her and tell her exactly what's going on. She's like, "I don't care about that stuff; I'm cool." So we'll see. And also, the parents of my first high school boyfriend. I think I would feel weird if they saw it.
IGN: This movie points out how unsafe certain scenarios are and how trusting we are as a society. Do you feel any of that more now after having done and seen the movie? Are you like, "Hey, ladies… don't just go meet up with random dudes?"
Duffy: It's funny, because that's a fear that I had already, especially in those MySpace days, maybe six years ago where girls would just go out and meet someone and based on this persona, decide that they like them and go and have sex with them. I remember I had a guy friend of mine, and he had what he called a "bang book." He was just a platonic friend but he had printed out all the profile pictures of all the girls that he'd met on there and had a one night stand with. He had notes on there and would share it with his friends, and that was horrifying to me.
So the fear for me was already there. And I think it's a little terrifying that women are just so—anybody—I have guy friends who would go on a date with a girl, and the girl becomes obsessed. So I guess it's both ways, but how open we are to just letting new people into our lives and just trusting them is kind of a scary thing.
IGN: Obviously, there have been changes since the original came out, and one of them is that technology has progressed since then, and it makes certain things easier and more accessible.
Duffy: In the original, the girl who gets strangled is a hooker that he has to go and pick up in Times Square, and I think it's interesting that the choice was like, "Oh, you don't need to hire hookers anymore, just find a girl online. Just find someone who is totally DTF."
IGN: I can't believe you just dropped "DTF."
To hear more from Megan, listen to the Keepin' it Reel Podcast, where we chat with her at length about the production of Maniac. Or follow Megan on Twitter here.
Chris Carle is Entertainment Editorial Director at IGN.com. He really wants to die in a movie someday. Follow him on Twitter and IGN.
Source : ign[dot]com
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