Carrie-Anne Moss: 'Die Alone' offered 'capable, funny' character

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 18 (UPI) -- Carrie-Anne Moss said she wanted to make her new movie, Die Alone , in theaters and digital video on demand Friday, because she anticipated her character would be fun to play.

Moss portrays Mae, a survivor of a post-apocalyptic plague who rescues an amnesiac, Ethan (Douglas Smith).

"She's just so capable," Moss told UPI in a recent Zoom interview. "She's so funny and witty."

Moss, 57, has played many capable characters in her career.

In The Matrix , she was Trinity, a master of martial arts in a virtual world. In Red Planet she played an astronaut exploring Mars. In Marvel's Jessica Jones , she played lawyer Jeri Hogarth. And in the recent The Acolyte , she played a Jedi master in the Star Wars universe.

Many of those roles have been stoic. In Die Alone, Mae interacts with Ethan and others with a dry wit. For example, she laments about how hard it is to find the correct prescription glasses in the apocalypse.

Mae teaches Ethan how to survive, and protects him from marauders and infected people. The pandemic in Die Alone involves vegetation contaminating humans and spreading.

Filmed when productions resumed following the COVID-19 pandemic, Moss said she could draw on her experience living through a real-life pandemic.

"You're not just imagining what it would be like," Moss said. "You've actually gone through it."

The production of Die Alone also created a palpable reality for the actors, Moss said. Much of the movie takes place in a house Mae has secured, the interior of which was built behind a facade used for a previous production.

"They did all that internal stuff, built that whole shell of the inside in a very short period of time," Moss said. "It was so real and added so much to the world of it."

The amnesia storyline of Die Alone reminded Moss of her 2000 film, Memento , in which she played a femme fatale manipulating a detective with short-term memory loss. The plot of Die Alone proved to be quite different, though Moss did not wish to spoil it.

"I'm not looking to repeat things, but when I looked at the whole story, I felt like nah, it's not Memento at all," Moss said.

Moss did revisit her Matrix role in 2021's The Matrix Resurrections . Looking back at the 1999 original, she said she still gets a kick out of seeing her frozen mid-air pose, which introduced the film's concept of hacker heroes moving faster than bullets.

"It gets just cooler as I get older and go, 'Oh, that was me back in the day,'" she said.