Jeff Heller
Julie Bowen has been a staple on television for the better part of three decades, from roles in series such as E.R, Boston Legal, Ed and LOST, to her Emmy-winning role as Claire Dunphy on Modern Family. Her film roles have included Happy Gilmore, Horrible Bosses, Hubie Halloween and Totally Killer.
Bowen’s newest project is Peacock’s pop horror series, HYSTERIA!. When a beloved varsity quarterback disappears during the “Satanic Panic” of the late 1980s, a struggling high school heavy metal band of outcasts realize they can capitalize on the town’s sudden interest in the occult by building a reputation as a Satanic metal band, until a bizarre series of murders, kidnappings, and reported “supernatural activity” triggers a leather-studded witch hunt that leads directly back to them.
We chatted with Bowen about her role in the series, her inspirations for her performance, her acting process, and what frightens her the most.
You don’t have a lot of horror on your resume. I’m just curious as to what drew you to the role.
It was not necessarily the horror element at all. It was the element of Matthew Scott Kane, the writer and executive producer, and showrunner. He had given me the pilot, and I loved that we’re not sure if my character Linda is sane or insane by the end of the pilot. And as I was reading the pilot originally, I thought, “Oh, she’s the mom. This is all going to be a story about the kids, and this will be like a finger-shaking mom that comes in once an episode,” and that did not interest me. And then I realized, “Oh, no, we’re going to really wonder what’s going on in Linda’s head,” and I’m still not sure.
Did you draw any type of inspiration for your performance at all?
I’m terrified of horror movies. I’m really scared of them. And my kids are forbidden to jump-scare me ever. When they were little and they would pop out, they would have their iPad time taken away. So, I could not draw too much inspiration from actual horrors or thrillers because I’m too scared. So, I just put that hair on and those clothes and was like, “Okay, this is who you are.”
I remember benign neglect from parenting. I remember my parents sort of smoking in the other room while we were in the basement doing whatever, and what life was like pre-internet and pre-cell phone. You could really go down a rabbit hole, and your parents didn’t know what you were up to. So that was something to remember.
Yeah, I was going to mention that because it was very much representative of the 80s. This is not your first parenting role, obviously, but it’s a very different parenting role because it is a very different decade.
Yeah, there’s no information then. You had to wait until the six o’clock news or whatever, and then everybody gets the same news. If that news is wonky or skewed a certain way, as it was during the satanic panic, which was designed to get everybody crazy, what are you going to believe? You have to go to the library and go through a card catalog to find any different facts so it was very easy to spread panic back then. I remember thinking that Dungeons and Dragons was going to kill me somehow.
Some of your scenes are pretty intense. What’s your process like on set? Can you turn it on and off? Do you like to stay in the moment between takes? How do you like to work?
How many episodes have you seen?
The first six.
Yeah, well, seven and eight was when I finally had to just… I’m not a method actress at all, but I did find that I had to stay at a low boil all day, just like a simmer, just a low simmer of snarly, unhappy craziness in order to, when they said action, not feel like a complete idiot when I had to act the way that I needed to act for those scenes. Ordinarily, I like to just pop in and out. I find it actually works for me because then I can find fresh tears or fresh frustration, but by the end of doing Hysteria, I was dipping into the method land. It was tough.
When you’re done shooting, do you have to just let it all out? How do you relax? How do you finish this process?
Embarrassingly, we were shooting in a very small town in Georgia, Covington, and I was staying at a hotel. We would finish at two, three o’clock in the morning, and I would have to go home. First, there was a lot of makeup and prosthetics and everything to take off. I would just sit there for about… I couldn’t go to sleep. I needed an hour or something. Ordinarily, I’m like, immediately I’m in bed because sleep is God when you’re working. I had to sacrifice a lot of sleep in order to get to… I had to take it down. It took a while. I had to learn about box breathing. I felt weird.
I felt really weird. I didn’t love how it made me feel, but I thought, oh wow, this is what those people are talking about when they say that a character really gets under their skin. It’s uncomfortable.
Before I let you go, I just want to ask one quick question. What frightens you the most?
Oh, you can scare me with almost anything. Real life scares me. When you turn on the news and you see anything happening to children scares me. But any jump scare at all, I shriek and I don’t calm down for a long time.
You can watch our interview with Julie Bowen below.
All episodes of Peacock’s pop-horror series HYSTERIA! premiere on October 18, 2024.
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