Willa Fitzgerald Finds Breakout Role In Serial Killer Thriller ‘Strange Darling’ Amid “Golden Age” For Women On Screen

SPOILER ALERT: The following story contains details from the plot of Magenta Light Studios’s Strange Darling .

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If you’re not familiar with the name Willa Fitzgerald, you will be soon.

A 33-year-old Nashville native who’s been working for a decade-plus, Fitzgerald has drawn notice to this point for a few prominent turns on television. Notable credits in that area include Reacher , The Fall of the House of Usher , and Scream: The TV Series . But it’s in Strange Darling , an ingenious, low-budget thriller from rising filmmaker JT Mollner, that she’s found what should be a star-making role.

Strikingly shot on 35mm by actor-turned-DP Giovanni Ribisi, Strange Darling seemed to come out of nowhere when it hit theaters last Friday, almost a year after its Fantastic Fest premiere. But within a short amount of time, and without the marketing support of a genre breakout like Longlegs , the film has become a low-key word-of-mouth phenomenon. Packed with indelible twists and turns, which emerge over the course of six nonlinear chapters, it’s set amid the remote Oregon wilderness and watches as a seemingly innocent one-night stand takes a dark turn, unraveling into a lethal game of pursuit.

Examining the chilling crescendo of a serial killer’s rampage that has terrorized the Western United States for years, the indie has Fitzgerald playing a character known only as The Lady, with Kyle Gallner as her love interest, The Demon. It’s difficult to discuss the pic without spoiling the experience, but suffice it to say, Fitzgerald is in total command of what proves to be a multifaceted and blisteringly intense performance, displaying range that should lead to a long career.

In conversation with Deadline, Fitzgerald offers her point of view on The Lady’s quest for “connection” over the course of Mollner’s allegory, delving into the love she feels for her character that trumps any she’s felt before, and why we’re currently in a “golden age” of female performance.

DEADLINE: What’s it like for you, with the film now out in the world? Have you sensed the buzz around it? In L.A. at least, it’s been a little tricky to get tickets.

WILLA FITZGERALD : Is that true? I didn’t even know that. In a lot of ways, that’s the dream that rarely gets realized, to have a movie that you love actually make it to this stage and be on this many screens, and then also have people talking about it and going to see it. I’ve been working for over a decade at this point, and it’s just so rare that you get to have that kind of opportunity, and I think that’s not lost on any of us. We all are just so proud and excited and gratified to have this movie out in the world, because it was a long road. We shot it two years ago, and there were a lot of points at which it felt like it could have turned out a different way.

DEADLINE : What has the role of The Lady given you that no other has?

FITZGERALD : I mean, I knew the minute that I read the script that this was a singular opportunity. I had never read anything that allowed me the possibility to explore that much range, and to have that much space to just fly free. I think that we are kind of in the golden age of film and TV, in a lot of ways, for women. As a demographic, I think we’re getting a lot more interesting roles, and a lot more interesting opportunities to play a broad spectrum of experience, and I was just so excited about this project when I first read it because I had never read anything like it before. I’d never seen a character like that before. I think it was exciting, too, because on the page, I was like, whoa, this is a puzzle that I’m going to have to put together in order to make this person. And that’s what I find most exciting as an actor.

DEADLINE : Obviously, conditions on set are not necessarily as intense as they appear on screen, but Strange Darling is a very intense movie. Was there anything that scared you about your role?

FITZGERALD : Definitely. When I read the script for the first time, I felt kind of sick. I knew that I wanted to do the job really, really badly, and I also knew how hard a project this was going to be — how big of a lift it was going to be to shoot, and to just kind of be in, day in and day out. I think that the most surprising thing for me while I was shooting it, and also even still when I watch it, is the amount of love I have for this character. I feel like it exceeds the amount of love I’ve ever had for any character. I feel so protective of her and so deeply empathetic with her, and I think that’s in relation to the scale of the ask. The role itself was asking so much, and I kind of had to figure out how to go those places, and I think that’s a hard thing to untangle even after the fact.

DEADLINE: What do you think it is that makes The Lady and The Demon perfectly matched? What is it about The Demon that makes him her “final guy,” so to speak — the one who will take part in her undoing?

Buzzy Serial Killer Thriller 'Strange Darling', 'Between The Temples' With Jason Schwartzman & Carol Kane Test Indie Market - Specialty Preview

FITZGERALD : I love that question. I think I probably wrote in my script a million times, “He’s the one.” I think that’s certainly how The Lady feels about The Demon, and I guess for me, the fundamental quest for The Lady is one of connection, and it’s constantly being thwarted by external [forces] that then are revealed to be more internal. But I think there is an undeniable truth to their connection in the motel room, and there is, I think, something in those scenes that’s so beautiful and so heartbreaking because there is a totally different outcome that’s possible, and yet the outcome that comes to pass is just sort of fated. I think that their entire pursuit of one another is also one of the hope that it could be different, that when they do meet again, which I think feels inevitable for both of them, maybe what happens next won’t be what happens next. So I was just really interested and captivated by [those] sort of highly dissonant desires that were contained within The Lady.

DEADLINE: You feel there was sincerity to The Lady when she expressed love for The Demon, even if she is seemingly a psychopath luring him into a trap?

FITZGERALD : I don’t think she’s a psychopath at all. I think that she’s incredibly sincere when she says that to him in the icebox…I think the movie’s exploring a lot of different things, but I do think that fundamentally what makes it work for me is the fact that we’re telling a story about two people who deeply feel everything that’s happening to them. I feel like when we talk about this idea of a psychopath, there’s a sense that there’s a lack of empathy or understanding, and I think that really what we’re seeing is an exploration, an allegory of what it means to be your own worst enemy. Because ultimately, it’s these things that are happening for her that are maybe not happening externally that are ruining her chances at connection, which is ultimately the thing that she’s most deeply seeking.

DEADLINE: What’s your take on the ideas Mollner is interrogating here? He certainly seems interested in modern gender dynamics, as The Lady speaks with The Demon early on about the fears women have going into private situations with men. Later, the character uses other peoples’ expectations of her, as a woman, against them, to navigate some tricky situations…

FITZGERALD : I mean, I think that everything that she says to him in the car is earnest and not manipulative, and I think that why that scene works with successive rewatching, too, is that she’s fundamentally talking about a lack of safety that she feels in the world, which is true. She is constantly reaching out to other people to try and feel a connection to them and is constantly being thwarted by something that feels incredibly real.

As far as what the movie is saying, I think that JT has done a beautiful job of making a movie that says a lot of things, and says a lot of things in a way that is open for interpretation. And I do feel protective of people’s experience of understanding the movie in the way that they’re going to understand the movie. I think that’s kind of the biggest gift that I can give as an artist, is something that is able to be interpreted.

I really feel like when things tell you what they are, they steal the most fundamental quality that we seek when we interact with art, and that’s our own interpretation. I think that what’s beautiful about this is, like a folk tale or an allegory, it gives you a lot of space to read the story in the way that your life is leading you to read it. I think there’s a lot of really smart readings that excite me and feel in line with my own personal reading, which obviously I have, and was hugely important to how I thought about taking on the role of The Lady. And I think I’ve told you some of that. But what’s really exciting to me is seeing how everyone else is interpreting it.

DEADLINE: You mentioned earlier that there’s a lot of opportunity these days for female actors. Whether it be Fair Play , Promising Young Woman or Gone Girl , it seems to me that recent years have brought a lot of smart, female-driven projects with a ferocity to them, in terms of their exploration of gender and relationships. What do you think the proliferation of these kinds of stories says about our culture now?

FITZGERALD : I think that Promising Young Woman , great movie, Gone Girl , amazing movie — kind of movies at opposite ends of the spectrum, in terms of what those roles mean and how they can be read. And I think that what I find exciting about the moment that we’re in is that women are being provided the opportunity to play roles that are across a wide spectrum of morality, from amorality to high moral centers. I think that as an actor, what is most interesting and exciting, for me, is finding the characters that, on the page, are complicated, and some people could write off as one thing, and then complicating that and being like, “But no, this person is actually a fully realized, actual human, and here’s their pain, their history, their past, their thing that has made them into the person that they are today.”

I think that is generally something in the past that has been the domain of male roles, and I think that it’s very exciting to be in this moment. Of that spectrum, I think our movie is more similar to Gone Girl in some ways, but I think it also has tones of a Promising Young Woman . I think it’s interesting that those were the two movies that you referenced, and I think that there’s just a reaction against also the strong female lead, and instead making it the complicated female lead and embracing the fact that a woman doesn’t necessarily have to be good by some moral standard, or strong by some similar moral standard, to be a character that you should want to play as a woman.

DEADLINE: What are your career goals? Do you have any bucket list aspirations?

FITZGERALD : I think what I’m always most drawn to is something that feels new to me. Obviously, there’s no new songs, there’s no new movies. Everything is somehow related to something you’ve probably seen before. But I do feel very lucky in my career to have gotten the opportunity to play a lot of different types of roles. That’s always what I’m seeking out, is something that feels like new territory to explore. It’s hard to say what that is, in particular, because I think oftentimes it’s hard to predict what you don’t know. But I would love to do a period piece again; it’s been a long time since I’ve done that. There are things that I find fun as an actor, and I think there’s nothing more fun than getting to put on a very specific costume as a means of finding your way into something. But yeah, no. I’m open to whatever it is that feels new.

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