Inventing Anna actor Julia Garner interview: ‘Nothing’s ever really easy if you want it to be good'
Julia Garner talks about doing a classic werewolf film, Wolf Man, and approaching her character as portraying the seven stages of grief.
Julia Garner broke through with her scene-stealing performance as the titular scammer in Shonda Rhimes' 2022 thriller miniseries Inventing Anna on Netflix. But she's longed to headline a full-blown, big-screen adventure that got finally realised with Leigh Whannell's creature film Wolf Man. “This movie is, honestly, meant for the movie theatre. I think every movie is meant for the movie theatre. But this really is not meant to watch on a small screen. So you go to the movie theatre, have popcorn, get really scared, but know that you can go and have dinner with your friends afterwards, and be comfortable,” Julia told Hindustan Times in an interview.

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A new kind of horror
Wolf Man revolves around a family of three whose adventure turns lethal when a werewolf bites the father, Blake (Christopher Abbott), who consequently, over the course of the night, gradually turns into a wolf, much to the horror of his wife Charlotte (Julia) and their daughter Ginger. “It's an old-school, traditional monster movie, but set in 2024. It still felt modern. Even though it's old school, it's refreshing because people are not doing that anymore. Also, it's different for me because I've never been in a project like this. I want to try everything once and say that I tried it, and see where it goes,” said Julia.

While she's been a part of pacey thrillers like Inventing Anna or even tense psychological dramas like The Royal Hotel (2023), she's never partaken in a good ol' monster movie like Wolf Man, which she admitted was different but not easier. “Nothing's ever really easy if you want it to be good. Usually, the simplest things are the hardest. I've done horror and tense films and TV shows, but this felt like an action movie more than anything else. The amount of running I had to do in this movie was crazy. I never ran so much in my life," she says, laughing.
Becoming Charlotte
Physical training wasn't the only preparation Julia had to ensure for this role. Charlotte is no damsel in distress like most conventional horror flicks. She's introduced as a working mother in a rocky relationship with her husband, a family man. Director Leigh Whannell and his co-writer and wife Corbett Tuck imagined Wolf Man as a symbolic decline of the lead couple's marriage – him turning into a wolf is akin to them unable to see each other or hear each other, from the wife's point of view.

“I interviewed a lot of working mothers I knew. There's this enormous amount of pressure on women. There's always been, but in this day and age, they have to do everything perfectly. That's not realistic, that's really hard. They had this common feeling, ‘I wish there were eight of me. There’s not just enough hours in a day.' They all had this tiredness inside them,” said Julia, who had to convey the exhaustion of working mothers through her role in a creature movie.
Her co-star Christopher spent hours watching animal videos on YouTube in order to get the body language of a wolf right. He even spent six hours every day in the make-up chair for the prosthetic, which helped him get into the wolf's skin, literally. His metamorphosis also aided Julia, who believes in feeding off her screen partner's energy. “That makes the performance better because it makes it more real. There's nothing better than what feels like reality. The camera is just capturing a real moment. You never want to ‘act,’ as an actor. That's like my worst nightmare. You don't want that,” she said.

Playing a wolf's wife
While Christopher clearly had the titular character in Wolf Man, Julia's role was no less author-backed. Leigh, a horror veteran and the force behind the Saw and Insidious franchises, gave his own spin to the werewolf sub-genre by making the metamorphosis into the wolf more real, gradual, and emotional. Julia remembers him describing it as slowly losing the “connection” in a relationship. “He wanted to approach it like a disease, an illness, that Blake was turning into a wolf,” Julia recalled.
His brief opened a door for Julia, who then began reading books on grief and loss. She came back with a suggestion – to play out the seven stages of grief throughout the movie. Shock, denial, guilt, anger, and depression finally give way to reconstruction and acceptance. Somewhere in there, she threw a bit of desperation or delusion too. “She's desperate that somehow, he might hear her. She's desperate to be heard. Something is devastating about that. Also devastating that the potential, the dream is dead. Just thinking about that can make anyone upset,” Julia added.
In a way, then, Wolf Man is a creature movie counterpart of Justin Baldoni's 2024 sleeper hit romantic drama It Ends With Us, which starts off as a happy family movie before spiralling into a woman's quest to end the cycle of abuse for the sake of her daughter. Julia's Charlotte also reaches a point when she recognises the protector as the predator. “You get to the point that you have acceptance. Is he alive technically? Yeah, sure. But he is not alive. The person I married, the father of my daughter, is not around. If I'm still thinking he's going to change, we're all going to die. You just get into survival mode. The adrenaline just really kicks in. You do what's best for your family,” Julia said.
