Midnight Mass: Kate Siegel on the What Happens When You Die Speech
[Editor's note: The following contains spoilers for Midnight Mass Episode 4, “Book IV: Lamentations.”]Midnight Mass is absolutely packed with incredible monologues, but one of the most unforgettable of the bunch has to be when Kate Siegel’s Erin shares her answer to the question, “What happens when we die?”
Earlier in that particular sequence, Erin recalls a rather crushing thing her mother once told her as a kid. Her mother got pet doves from the mainland and when they finally arrived, the first thing she insisted on doing was clipping their wings — and forced a seven-year-old Erin to hold them while she did it. When Erin questioned why see was doing that, her mother told her, “Everyone gets their wings clipped at some point,” and that her own wings were clipped the day Erin was born.
It’s a dark, heartbreaking memory, but later on the tone of the conversation shifts. Erin asks Riley (Zach Gilford), “What happens when you die?” After Riley shares his thoughts, Erin paints a beautiful picture of what happened to the unborn baby she lost. It’s heartening and brimming with love and hope.
During an episode of Collider Ladies Night, I asked Siegel about her approach to that particular sequence, specifically paving the way from the devastating dove story to her touching answer to the “what happens when you die" question. Here’s what she said:
“Luckily the writing there is just exquisite. It’s the most perfectly built playground. So I started by obviously reading it and memorizing it over and over and over again, and running it over and over and over again. And then, I have children and I have children that I don’t have anymore and so when the time came, my job again was to get out of the way. It wasn’t about trying to craft a perfect idea of how the arc is going to be from the sadness of my mother to the glory of my child or from loss to loss or from the piece to the whole. It was more about, be truly in the room and know who you are, know who Erin is and then try to explain it to Riley, my childhood love. It’s truly I’m telling him what has happened to me since I’ve seen you.”
Eager to hear more about Siegel’s experience working on Midnight Mass? We’ve got you well covered in that department! Be sure to catch my full uncut conversation with Siegel in podcast form below for more on the Episode 5 boat scene, Erin’s final scene in the show and so much more!
التعليقات على الموضوع