‘Weapons’ star Amy Madigan talks Gladys, prequel reports, and our obsession (exclusive)

Warning: This article contains major spoilers from Weapons.

Amy Madigan knows you’re obsessed with her.

Well, more specifically, obsessed with Aunt Gladys, the red-wigged, lipstick-smeared, top-secret character she plays in Weapons, the horror-thriller that opened in theaters last weekend to a roaring box-office haul.

She’s seen some of the articles (like this one from Vulture or this one from the Los Angeles Times) advocating for an Amy Madigan Oscar nomination, as well as some of the other bits and bobs, like the reactionary memes going around the internet. (“Gay guys be like ‘she literally saved my life‘ and it’s just Gladys from Weapons.”)

Madigan, 74, isn’t afraid to admit she did the damn thing.

“The people I work with will send me some links and things like that,” the actress — whose credits also include Field of Dreams, Uncle Buck, and The Hunt — tells Entertainment Weekly in her very first interview about the character, whose motivations are one big spoiler in the context of Weapons. “It’s really nice because I felt my work is really good in this piece. I’ve been doing it a long time, so to get something that’s this gratifying and people like it…it’s fun. It’s given me a good giggle, but as you’re going up, you could come down just as quickly. So you have to take it with a grain of salt.”

Over a Zoom conversation on Thursday afternoon, she laughs to herself while considering the audience reaction to her performance, which is strange to witness. Madigan has a warm, welcoming Midwestern tinge to her voice that comes from her time in Chicago, but her giggle is that same soft “he-he” she delivers on screen as Gladys before forcing Benedict Wong’s Principal Marcus to brutally beat his husband to death.

It’s a sign of why writer/director Zach Cregger cast Madigan in this role, which is key to the entire movie. “It’s such a narrow bullseye, right? You need somebody who is naturally sparky and hilarious and also ruthless and laser-focused and intimidating,” Cregger previously told EW. “And Amy can do anything. She has that Chicago Midwestern spark that just oozes off of her in a wonderful way, but at her core, there’s something reptilian that she can access.”

Until only recently, no one felt all that comfortable talking about Gladys. Madigan appeared at the Los Angeles premiere of Weapons in early August, but she skipped the press line and didn’t participate in interviews until now. That’s because she’s the answer to the film’s mystery.

On one seemingly random Wednesday morning at exactly 2:17 a.m., 17 out of 18 children in Ms. Gandy’s Maybrook Elementary School class woke up, got out of bed, left their homes, and ran into the night, leaving the town to deal with the trauma of what happened to these missing kids. A series of shifting character POVs — the teacher (Julia Garner), a father of the missing (Josh Brolin), a local police officer (Alden Ehrenreich), the school principal (Wong), and Alex, the only boy from Gandy’s class who didn’t vanish (Cary Christopher) — eventually reveals the reason.

Gladys arrives as the aunt of Mrs. Lilly (Callie Schuttera), Alex’s mom. She comes to stay with the family amid her failing health but soon infects the entire household. Though it’s not so explicitly laid out, Gladys uses some kind of ritualistic magic, powered by the barbed branches from a creepy potted tree, to turn the parents into lifeless puppets that she can control. It also replenishes her health, as if her victims become her own personal supernatural IVs. Gladys uses this same enchantment to summon Alex’s classmates to her that fateful Wednesday night to hold in the Lilly’s basement.

During casting, Cregger set up a lunch with Madigan to discuss his vision, telling himself to not offer her the job on the spot — even though he would. She remembers talking and laughing over the course of a couple hours. “We really wanted to make her a very, very unique person,” Madigan says of Gladys. “You have to be careful. You don’t want it to be like the person from this spooky movie or the person from that.”

Madigan commends Cregger’s openness in sharing his personal story behind Gladys. The filmmaker spoke in the past about how the final section of the movie is an allegory for his own personal and familial struggles with alcoholism. That aspect “carried a lot of truthfulness and weight for me and how I grew up and people I knew,” Madigan comments. Some other references that came up included Bette Davis’ severe makeup transformation in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and the original black-and-white Nosferatu. “How you make somebody just drained of everything,” she explains. “Those kind of iconic things really stuck in my mind.”

Madigan further notes her and Cregger’s shared love of photographer Diane Arbus. “He sent me a book, actually, but we looked at a lot of her self-portraits of the de-structuring of a woman’s face and how that would look.”

The unique appearance of Gladys became another big touchstone for the character. She remembers all the screen tests and trying on some 20 wigs until they found the right red-haired piece with the right bangs. The actress praises costume designer Trish Summerville, whose team then adorned her with all the brooches, bangles, and those bulging glasses.

“The look is very jarring,” Madigan comments. “Gladys looks great. She’s really happy with how she looks. She loves her wardrobe. She loves who she is. So there’s a certain confidence that you walk in that room with. I don’t walk in with great confidence like that. Sometimes I do. So with Gladys, she’s very confident.”

Madigan recalls one day on set when the crew surprised her. She walked into the makeup trailer early one morning to find the department members dressed as Gladys, using some of the extra wigs they had in storage. She later walked onto the set to find the rest of the production also in Gladys attire. “I was so taken aback,” she admits. “I had no idea this was going on. A couple people got so inventive. Somebody took a mop and dyed it red and put it on their head. It was really fun and funny.”

That last part became key to unlocking Gladys. While there is plenty of horror wrapped up in this character, Madigan and Cregger honed in on how funny she inherently is. One scene, in particular, at the end of the film captures that essence. Alex uses Gladys’ own magic against her, commanding the kidnapped children to rip her limb from limb. The results are a chaotic, guerilla-style chase sequence in which the swarm of kids tear through neighbors’ houses like a mudslide, toppling furniture, crashing through windows, busting down doors, all to get their hands on their tormenter. A long-distance shot gets a lot of laughs from the audience: Madigan as Gladys waving her arms wildly in the air as she scampers between houses, followed shortly by a crowd of screaming kids.

Madigan was insistent that she film that herself. “I said, ‘Oh no, I’m going to be doing this running,’ except when I get tackled at the very end,” she says. “Thank goodness this stunt woman came in and was tackled. Then I had to roll over and get eviscerated. Zach would say ‘you’re panicked’ and all that, but ‘just have your body be out there, flail around.’ That’s all I need to hear because I like being a physical actor.”

That, to her, is why Weapons works as a film: “Reel people in, really make them nervous, then they laugh a bit, and then you smack ’em in the face.”

So much of Gladys is still very much an enigma. Cregger admitted in press interviews even he doesn’t fully know the minute mechanics of this character and her magic. He did, however, offer Madigan two options for a backstory, one being that Gladys was a human desperately trying to prolong her life by any means necessary, the other being that she’s not human at all. Madigan isn’t saying definitively which origin she picked. She adheres to Cregger’s school of thought in this matter, to give audiences the freedom to interpret. She likes how that mystery makes viewers lean forward in their seats, as she puts it.

“I used a lot of different bits of information, but I wouldn’t say it’s one or the other. I think it’s a combination of a lot of things,” Madigan teases. “People ask that question, ‘Is she real or is it this or that?’ I said, ‘Good, you guys figure it out ’cause I can’t answer that.'”

We may end up getting some of those answers, though. The Hollywood Reporter, confirmed by Deadline, published a story this week that Warner Bros. and New Line are in early talks with Cregger to turn a scrapped chapter from Weapons about Gladys’ origins into an entire prequel movie. A rep for the studio declined to comment, but said it’s just speculation at this point.

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When asked if she would be open to the idea of returning for a prequel, Madigan likens it to reading those pieces calling for her Oscar nomination. “It’s not that I discount it, but in this business, nothing’s real till it’s real,” she says. “I just had such a great time working with Zach and being inside that brain of his. That’s really the gift of how the movie came out. The other stuff has to do with all sorts of conversations that I would never be privy in and business things like that. But, you know, I love Gladys, so I’ll leave it at that.”

It’s fair to say we all love Gladys. Unless there’s some other major horror character that pops up between known and Halloween, you can bet we’ll see a physical manifestation of that love from a sea of costumed Gladyses running amok this spooky season. Madigan hopes her new fans will share photos online so she can see how close they recreated her look.

“People better get those red wigs now,” she says, adding, “I know people want those glasses. I know they do.”

Weapons is now playing in theaters.