Maika Monroe On Longlegs, Auteurship and Keeping the Industry at Arm’s Length
Words: Alison Rumfitt | Photographer and Creative Director: Morganne Boulden | Styling: Tabitha Sanchez | Hair: Jake Gallagher | Makeup: Liv Mardorma | Video: Camille Mariet
Make it stand out
When Maika Monroe appears via video call on my laptop screen, I find it slightly jarring. Ever since I first saw her in David Robert Mitchell’s astonishing sophomore feature film, It Follows (2014), Maika has been an actress whose career I have paid unwavering attention to. It Follows was life changing for me. It opened up my love of film and it helped me realise, in a strange way, aspects of my own identity; my womanhood and my awareness of my own trauma are both forever tied to It Follows. It was akin to the type of self-actualising that Gen Z are similarly experiencing thanks to Jane Shoenbruns’s I Saw the TV Glow (2024).
It Follows, if you haven’t seen it, is still an excellent watch. A small-scale and rather bleak horror, it follows Jay, played memorably by Maika, navigating a nightmarish coming-of-age after she loses her virginity and is exposed to an unexplained sexually transmitted curse.
The reason I’m talking with her today is another horror film: Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs (2024), in which Maika stars alongside industry legend Nicolas Cage. Any film with an actor as iconic and strange as Cage risks being tipped off-balance – it happened recently to Renfield (2023), where I spent the whole film wondering why it wasn’t just about Cage-as-Dracula. Longlegs is wise enough to deploy him very sparingly. Instead, almost the entire film is squarely on Monroe’s rookie FBI agent Lee Harker.
Shirt - Helmut Lang | Tank - Cou Cou Intimates | Skirt - Roberto Cavalli
Monroe’s performance is truly something to behold, but this is a tough film to talk about and I want to give nothing away. I ask her to give you, the reader, an elevator pitch, and she says: “The movie follows this… young FBI agent who seems to be highly intelligent to the point where she might be psychic. They put her on this case that they can’t seem to crack, trying to find a serial killer.”
I congratulate her on not revealing any of the plot at all. “Well,” she smiles, “there are certainly some twists along the way that I found unexpected. When I read the script for the first time, I really thought I knew where it was going and then it really took some turns.” She tells me she first received the script around Thanksgiving of 2022, and, upon reading it, became immediately passionate about getting the part. “I didn’t want anyone else to play this role. That doesn’t often happen for me.”
Corset - Vintage | Shorts - Vivienne Westwood
“When I read the Longlegs script for the first time, I really thought I knew where it was going and then it really took some turns.”
I don’t think anyone else could have played the role. Lee Harker feels constructed so perfectly for Monroe’s particular brand, whilst not being like any other part I’ve seen her in. Monroe is a great audience cipher for a horror film. In Watcher (2022) she is a Hitchcock blonde unravelling under paranoia, in the underrated Significant Other (2022) she is one half of a couple who come under bizarre alien attack. While her character in Longlegs is alienated from the world; she is almost purposefully unrelatable, closer to Rust Cohle of True Detective than Clarice Starling.
Maika discloses she went to a different well for inspiration for Longlegs: “Rooney Mara in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” She clarifies, “They aren’t really similar people of course, they are both awkward and uncomfortable with everyday life. They are isolated. But then when working on the case, she is suddenly so alive, and that’s something that happens with Lee in Longlegs too. That’s where both of them feel the most comfortable.”
Dress - Philosophy Di Lorenzo Serafini
“Finding her was very interesting and a lot of that happened on the first day of filming, which is one of the first scenes of the film, weirdly.” Maika continues, “She’s put on this case going door-to-door with a partner, and, well, things go wrong. But she’s bouncing off a partner for most of it.” I’m surprised to hear that the scene she is referring to was her first day of filming. It’s a big, intense set piece. “It was a crazy first day! There were a lot of moving parts to that scene but I loved that being the first day, I loved being thrown into the deep end.”
In real life, Maika says she couldn’t feel more differently than the role, except for occasional, similar bouts of anxiety. She tells me of when she surprised fans at an early screening of Longlegs and struggled with being in front of the audience, despite being very comfortable on any set she finds herself on.
Dress - Prada | Top - Vintage | Shoes - Dolce & Gabanna | Underwear - Cou Cou Intimates
“So in that way I do relate to Lee. But you know, there’s quite a few differences.” She laughs, proving her own point. If Lee Harker is someone who laughs, we don’t get any hint of that in the film. And as dissimilar to Monroe as Lee is, she is similar with some of her other star turns. Monroe is a scream queen, albeit a very modern one. Looking over her career, the vast majority of roles she has undertaken are in indie movies, often skewing towards the horror genre.
“That just sort of happened,” she notes. “My first movie was the cool little indie called At Any Price with Dennis Quaid and Zac Efron and that went to the Venice Film Festival, and then I was cast in It Follows and The Guest and they popped off so unexpectedly. We were taking them to festivals. And I was just like wow, this must be how it goes… but nope. I was very lucky and that was completely abnormal. So many movies are made every year and what clicks? It’s not random, those films are great, but it is hard for things to get noticed. There’s so much I’m not in control of, I did a movie with Jason Reitman (Labor Day, 2013) who’s previous five or so movies had been nominated for Oscars, so I was like well, it’s set, I’m gonna be in an Oscar-nominated movie… and it just wasn’t that. I’m incredibly proud of that film but you don’t know what’s going to intrigue audiences. Every year what people are drawn to changes.”
How does she manage the whiplash? “I think, with all the success I’ve had, there have also been hardships and deep lows and so many nos. It keeps you humble. I have very good people around me. I have a healthy distance from the industry. There was a time where I had a need to keep working and get in front of everyone but as I get older, I realise that doesn’t feel good. It’s not as easy as just turning it off, but I just try and be aware of [these feelings] and keep a safe distance from it all.”
“With all the success I’ve had, there have also been hardships and deep lows and so many nos. It keeps you humble. I have very good people around me.”
I nearly ask her about those lows, but I don’t want to take our conversation there, wherever there may be. Monroe was in Roland Emmerich’s awful Independence Day: Resurgence (2016), controversially replacing Mae Whitman who played the role of the president’s daughter in the first film. In the same year, Monroe was in another failed science fiction blockbusters, the other being YA adaptation The 5th Wave (2016). I don’t know if those are the lows she refers to, of course, but it's notable that in the years following the two movies, she returned back to the types of indie films in which she first saw success and that is where she has been for the most part ever since.
Bodysuit: Cou Cou Intimates | Underwear - Cou Cou Intimates | Veil - Radradulescu
Yet Longlegs feels like a step up. Perhaps it's simply because she holds her own, as an actress, opposite a formidable Nicholas Cage. At the risk of spoiling the film, they share very little screen time together, but the moments they do share are the core of the whole story – the real point of unravelling. That scene was their final day of filming. Monroe tells me that she hadn’t even met him until she walked into the room, the cameras rolling and Cage, transformed into an almost unrecognisable figure, waiting for her.
For those that haven’t seen an Osgood Perkins film, it might be hard to understand what I mean when I ask her how she found the tone of the dialogue. But Perkins’ scripts are deliberately unreal – think Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster (2015) but there’s Satan worship.
Maika relishes talking about her craft. “Reading the script, it was very easy to imagine the world, it was so detailed. [Perkins] adds so much, he includes what the characters are thinking, which is not what I’m used to reading. That was quite cool. Initially I got a sense, and the next steps were trying to figure out her mannerisms and her cadence of speaking. He gave ideas but I wanted to find something unique in her, something that people haven’t seen. It was very fun, probably one of my favourite roles.”
When I ask her what directors she'd like to work with she says Lanthimos and Julia Ducournau, the French provocateur behind Raw and Titane. She wants to keep working with interesting auteurs. Speaking of which, I follow up by trying to get some They Follow hints, yet as I expect, the whole thing is under lock and key. I was shocked when I saw a sequel to It Follows announced, though happy that both director David Robert Mitchell and star Monroe were returning to it – an It Follows film without them is nearly impossible to imagine after all.
“I’d been hearing rumours about the sequel,” she adds, “and David had been talking to me although he didn’t mention it. I knew he’d only bring it up if the script was finished. Finally, finally he sent it and I…” She trails off. “I was blown away. He’s fucking brilliant. I don’t know how he does it, how his mind goes there. I’d have never in a million years thought that this would be where the story would go. It’s so interesting where you find Jay - it’s gonna be surprising, cool, sad, scary. I read it and just can’t believe I get to do this. When I filmed the first one, that was one of my favourite experiences. It’s been ten years, I look back on that as being so magical. It’s such an honour.”
“It’s so interesting where you find Jay in the ‘It Follows’ sequel' - it’s gonna be surprising, cool, sad, scary.”
That’s all I’m getting out of her regarding They Follow, though and obviously I don’t really want to know any more. I want to see it properly rather than, as typical on the run up to a new release online, find out spoilers in little increments. Post-Longlegs, Monroe’s star is only going to grow. They Follow might be a homecoming, but I imagine it might be more than that; a chance for her to continue to showcase what a fascinating actress she is.
