Eike Schroter / Netflix
Ryan Murphy isn’t the only showrunner who has a reliably great pool of actors to put through different scary scenarios. Across Mike Flanagan’s expanding universe, Carla Gugino has played a ghost, a mother on the verge of a breakdown, a broken-hearted narrator, and a wife handcuffed to a bed. Thanks to The Fall of the House of Usher, she can, among other things, add a bartender, a woman with a medical crisis, a sex worker, a security guard, death, a raven, and a chimpanzee to the list.
If you are worried your mind started wandering while reading that list and you are now in an Edgar Allan Poe-induced fever dream, fear not, as Gugino really does inhabit all of those identities in Flanagan’s last spooky limited-series Netflix offering—yes, including the chimpanzee.
Gugino’s impressive ability to simultaneously portray contradictory emotions has been utilized with maximum effect by Flanagan in the past. In Usher, the showrunner has given one of his frequent collaborators an even larger supernatural playground than previous projects to showcase dueling emotions, calling on her to lean into preposterous scenarios (like mimicking an ape) without breaking a sweat. The chimpanzee moment in Episode 2 is one that walks up to the line of absurdity, especially so early in the season, but it works, and I’m pretty sure that is all because of Gugino.