Peter Sarsgaard (right) and Mireille Enos play parents who cover up their daughter’s crime in Amazon … [+]
Jasper Savage / Amazon Studios
Peter Sarsgaard reunites with his The Killing co-star Mireille Enos and writer/director Veeda Sud on The Lie, a terrifying drama centering on murder, conspiracy and otherwise ordinary people making bad decisions.
The film, premiering Tuesday Oct. 6 worldwide exclusively on Amazon Prime Video, is part of a planned eight-part film series called Welcome to The Blumhouse. The anthology of unsettling thrillers showcases diverse casts led by emerging filmmakers including Sud and other female directors. The Lie and another chilling thriller, Black Box, kick off the horrorfest, which is under the banner of Blumhouse, maker of provocative and highly acclaimed films including Get Out and Whiplash, as well as TV series including Sharp Objects. Two additional films, Nocturne and Evil Eye, will be available on the streaming service beginning Tuesday Oct. 13, with the remaining titles set to arrive in 2021.
In The Lie, Sarsgaard plays Jay, a divorced father who tries to make up for his long absences as a traveling rock musician by overindulging his 15-year-old daughter Kayla (played by Joey King) whenever he shows up at his ex-wife’s house. While en route to take his daughter to ballet camp, father and daughter pick up Kayla’s friend, Brittany (Devery Jacobs), waiting alone at a bus stop to go to the same event. The girls’ friendship masks deep, underlying tension so when they pull over on the rural snowy road for a bathroom break, Jay is shocked when his daughter returns from the nearby woods alone. He discovers that his daughter has pushed her frenemy from a bridge into the icy waters of the river below. Instead of immediately calling the police, Jay decides to cover up the apparent murder, and eventually drags his ex (Mireille Enos) into the horrific conspiracy, which draws the estranged couple together to Kayla’s delight. Being a Blumhouse film, The Lie presents naturally unexpected twists and turns to this thriller.
Sarsgaard, who is married to actress Maggie Gyllenhaal, with whom his has two daughters, says Sud’s screenplay along with the opportunity to work again with his cast mate Enos and others associated with The Killing, made The Lie an opportunity he couldn’t pass up. As he discusses his newest film via Zoom, he is on location filming The Lost Daughter with Dakota Johnson and Paul Mescal, a thriller set on an island with Gyllenhaal making her feature film directorial debut. For the role, he has a bushy beard, which he occasionally fusses with as he talks about his role in The Lie.
Angela Dawson: What attracted you to The Lie?
Peter Sarsgaard: The destructive power of lying, which is such a big thing right now. Also, our own guilt, the way that it can kind of actualize something like this. Jay’s own ideas about having been a terrible parent, in a sense, make something like this possible. It empowers the lie. If he didn’t have so much guilt about his parenting, he wouldn’t have reacted the way that he did. I wouldn’t react that way. I would say, “What really happened. What’s going on? What are you talking about?”
Dawson: That must mean you’ve been doing some good parenting, right?
Sarsgaard: I think I am a good parent, yeah.
Dawson: Rebecca (Enos’ character) is reluctant to go along with the lie about Brittany’s whereabouts, initially. But eventually she joins the deception. What’s your theory on that? Is it the instinct to protect her daughter?
Sarsgaard: No, I think in some sense, it’s my (character’s) reaction that convinces her. The script is pretty well built that way where one thing leads to another to make this totally preposterous thing plausible. She is a more rational person. One of the reasons we’re not together anymore is because I wasn’t a very good husband or father. So, I’m the one who is there when it happens. It’s difficult to go back on my reaction. If she had been there, we might have walked back down to the river and seen what happened and tried to help Brittany. She fell off a bridge into the water—you don’t just walk away. She’s a more rational person and probably a better parent. So, it does take her longer (to become part of the deception) but it’s probably part of our old dynamics of our relationship that helps it along. We also fall back into an old routine.
One of the things I really liked about the script to begin with was the way the parents are brought back together. It’s almost like that’s what Kayla wanted.
Dawson: What was it like working again with Mireille and Veena on this, as well as working with Joey for the first time?
Sarsgaard: Veena told me she had this thing that she wanted me to read. It’s always a pleasure to work with the both of them. With Joey, I was very concerned about that role. After I read the script, I actually told Veena I wasn’t sure we could find anyone who could play that role. If you could imagine it on the page—that role—you wonder, “Who is this kid? What does that look like?” Then I also realized as I was doing it that it had something to do with me, where I also had to ask myself, “Who is this person?” Anyway, Joey did a wonderful job.
Dawson: I could almost imagine someone like Linda Blair doing this 50 years ago. A young girl with an innocent face with a very dark interior. Also, the film says something about parents who are so engrossed in their work that they are failing as parents and feel they have to try to make it up in other—sometimes inappropriate—ways.
Sarsgaard: Absolutely. That was the story of The Exorcist. Ellen Burstyn (plays) an actress who isn’t paying attention to her child and is a bad mother, and this is the price that bad mothers pay. They have demon children. So, (The Lie) reminded me, on some level, of that.
Peter Sarsgaard plays the father of a teenager (played Joey King) involved in a horrific crime in … [+]
Amazon Studios
Dawson: The Lie is one of the first Welcome To The Blumhouse films that is going to be rolling out on Amazon Prime Video. How do you like being part of this horror anthology?
Sarsgaard: I love it.
Dawson: Have you met (Blumhouse creator/producer) Jason Blum? What’s your take on him?
Sarsgaard: Oh, yeah. He has hit on a nerve and it’s like he’s just digging deeper and deeper into that spot. I knew about him through a mutual friend. When he first started getting successful producing these horror films, I couldn’t quite figure out what it was. I could see these films were well made but couldn’t quite put my finger on what was differentiating these from other films in the horror genre. But I think that they all have some aspect of them that we were talking about with The Exorcist. There’s some little thing that we all can relate to—like being a bad parent and your child ends up possessed by Satan, whatever it is, maybe killed someone, it had to do with something that was a flaw in you. That’s something all of us can probably relate to. It becomes hyperbolic and we draw it to its furthest place, but that’s what makes this type of genre film work.
Several of his other films draws on our instinctual fears. They say the reason why (white) people cross the street at night when they see an approaching Black man is because they believe he has the right to be furious. This is not abnormal, this is not an aberrant thing. Historically, in this country, you have a right to think, feel and do whatever it is you’re about to do—and that’s scary. It’s human, fundamentally. He takes those things and turns them into horror or a thriller, whatever the genre is.
Dawson: You’re working on your second film after wrapping The Batman since the coronavirus crisis impacted TV and film production. What have you noticed has changed on set?
Sarsgaard: As actors, the thing that we’re good at is reading other people’s feelings and behavior. Yeah, we can do that when they’re wearing a mask, total PPE and the whole thing, but it does distance us. A lot of people feel this, but I feel like I cannot touch someone in the world. I don’t touch people, mostly because I feel they don’t want to be touched, not because I think I’m going to get COVID touching, necessarily.
The first thing that hooks you into acting when you’re doing your first play or whatever, is being in the pod of the group, creating the fiction as a group. I have a daughter who plays by herself and is able to create a whole fantasy world by herself, but I believe that’s unusual. More common is the idea of we’re going to create this separate reality that mirrors our home together. “I see that and I see this,” and so on. We build this. We’re like architects. But now we’re all behind stuff and separated. We aren’t allowed to mingle and it makes it incredibly difficult. Personally, I don’t think it’s going to be a fantastic time for this type of art, although we might get some great novels or some great paintings out of it.
With my wife’s movie, it’s slightly different because we’re on an island with no (COVID-19) cases. The movie’s being shot in 28 days. Everyone’s away from their family, except for us. So, we can all be a little more intimate than we normally would be. We can afford to do that. We’re trying not to film anyplace that has a lot of cases, and we’re filming quickly.