Quotes

[on Theodora Crain] This is a woman who, at 9-years-old, experienced the trauma of her life and has pushed down her ability to feel things so entirely that she has created a almost superpower. Or she has held hands with a ghost and got a superpower? Could be both, who knows? In this moment, [Theo] is not only expressing what she is feeling off of that couch. She also, in the episode, has just left her sister's dead body. And her sister who, she hasn't spoken to her since they had this huge fight where she begged for help. She didn't help her then and all of these thing are happening...What I wanted to bring to it was those moments in your life where it's just a wave and these boundaries you set up for yourself between experiences just disappear and the weight of what it's like to be a human becomes too much."

[on discovering she was pregnant while filming The Haunting of Hill House] Hilariously, I found out that I was pregnant while we were filming episode six. That long one-take episode where I have to fall down. I was working out with our stunt coordinator, and we were doing it over and over and over again. And there had been some interesting math with my cycle, so I was like, "You know what? I'm just going to take a test to make sure." And I told Mike [Flanagan] that night, because we were going to be shooting the episode the next day, and the terror in his face was like nothing I had ever seen! He was like, "I've just been throwing my pregnant wife on the ground all day!"

[on the molestation scene in The Haunting of Hill House] As a woman and a survivor, I found it to be a very terrifying day on set and I was open with everyone about that. I was like, 'Hey, I'm really scared of this and I'd like to take some time to approach it,'"

[on Theodora Crain] There's a theory that a character is revealed in contradiction. It's just the way people live in the world, and the moment you really learn who a person is when they seem to contradict themselves. And Theo - our clenched fist with hair - is a walking example of that. Everything she is, she is the exact opposite. She is cold and removed, but she's also sobbing by the side of the road. And Theo experienced the trauma of her siblings along with her own trauma, so she would carry along her own recollection of that last night in the house, plus every time she was playing with Steven, or Shirley, or Luke, or Nell, she would touch them, and she'd have their trauma, too. Theo as a child grew up holding on to childhood trauma, and became very intimate with it, and probably wasn't as repulsed by it as adults, because it's so heartbreaking. And as a middle child, I think Theo is naturally a helper. So when you put those two things together, it kind of feels like the only thing Theo could have done with her life. She has all this deep experience with childhood trauma, and she desperately wants to help people.