It’s a cathartic ending, if not a content one. In a chilling final line, the child narrator notes that the missing kids may have been rescued, but th
It’s a cathartic ending, if not a content one. In a chilling final line, the child narrator notes that the missing kids may have been rescued, but they never recovered from their brainwashing.
Answers about the true nature of Gladys are destroyed along with her body.
So who or what exactly was this weird venerable woman in Weapons? Cregger himself has only theories, no solid confirmations. “I don’t know the answer, but I love that I don’t know the answer. I don’t need to know the answer,” he says. “I just need to know that it’s all possible.”
He discussed the possibilities with Madigan as she shaped her performance. “I presented Amy with two options of her origin story. I was like, ‘You can pick one of these two,’” Cregger says. “They’re very different options. And was like, ‘You don’t have to tell me, but it is either this or that.’ I don’t know which one she picked.”
One is that she was once a regular person, but her spells and corrosive actions are a last-ditch effort to heal herself of a life-threatening illness. In that scenario, he said, “She had to adopt this methodology that she uses out of a place of emergency to keep herself alive. I won’t say any more than that.”
The other option was that maybe she’s not a person at all. The off-kilter red wigs and outlandish make-up suggest Gladys is some other kind of creature, trying to simulate what she thinks a normal human being looks like. But she’s doing it very badly. “That’s an interesting way to think about it. I like that a lot,” Cregger says.
This was one of the possibilities he presented to Madigan, which he framed in the context of Javier Bardem’s Oscar-winning role as the uncanny, unstoppable killer in No Country for Old Men. “I talked with her about the Anton Chigurh character. You get this sense Anton Chigurh is potentially an immortal who has come to New Mexico and is doing an impression of the people around him,” Cregger says. “That’s why his haircut is so wrong and his clothes are clean, because he’s doing a bad impression of these Southwesterners.”
Costume designer Trish Summerville (The Hunger Games: Catching Fire) dressed Gladys in a style that can only be called “deranged grandma.” Cregger jokes that his immortal witch must have inadvertently drawn inspiration from geriatric retirees when she decided to venture into this compact town. “I like to think that maybe Gladys went to Boca Raton and looked around, and then just scraped an outfit together, and was like, ‘This is what a person does, right?’” he jokes. “She didn’t really think it through. Maybe that’s what’s going on.”
The witch’s facade cracks only twice. “Amy does this amazing thing where she shape-shifts throughout this movie. You never really feel like you’ve pinned her down, except maybe when she’s threatening Alex at the breakfast table,” Cregger says. “Maybe we’re seeing the real her, or maybe the real her is this vulnerable thing.” It happens when Alex offers to do what she commands, if only she’ll leave. “Amy looks so hurt by the fact that he doesn’t want her to stay in the house,” Cregger says. “I was like, ‘Is that the real her?’”
Madigan’s unusual appearance was augmented with withering prosthetics from Autonomous F/X and make-up artist Jason Collins. When Vanity Fair visited the studio with Sebastian Stan for our May cover story, Madigan’s sculpted head was on display, allowing pieces of Gladys’s patchy hair and wrinkled face to be applied and tested. “Amy’s actually got a fair amount of prosthesis on her face,” Cregger says. “We didn’t want to go too far. It’s just one toe into the grotesque. That was the balance.”
By far, the most crucial ingredient in Gladys was Madigan herself, who sold the kookiness while maintaining the menace. “With Amy in Field of Dreams, you see this sparky Chicago ball of energy, and it’s got that natural ebullience that I wanted,” Cregger says. “Then you watch Gone Baby Gone, and she has this total command and this stillness in. She’s just magical in that movie. I was like, ‘Okay, so she’s got the weight and she’s got the fluff.’ And then you watch Carnival, and she’s terrifying. I just could smell that she had everything I needed.”
He recalled driving to Malibu to meet her for lunch when he was casting the part. “I was like, ‘Okay, Zach, don’t offer her the role at lunch, even if it goes well.’ Because I’m an impulsive person,” the filmmaker says. “I’m telling you, dude: Within 10 minutes of sitting down at the table—the food hadn’t even come yet—I was like, ‘You have to play this part! There’s no one else. It has to be you.’ It was just so clear just looking at her. I was like, ‘This is it. I don’t need to hunt any further.’”
It may be the only thing about Gladys that came with certainty.
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