Alice Krige on going from Star Trek: First Contact to She Will

Screams, spooks, and bloody carnage have followed Alice Krige from her native South Africa to Hollywood. The Chariots Of Fire actress tends to get recognized the most for a string of horror and genre roles that started in 1981 with Ghost Story and includes Texas Chainsaw Massacre (the 2022 film), Gretel And Hansel, Silent Hill, and Sleepwalkers, not to mention Star Trek: First Contact, where she famously played the seductive and menacing Borg Queen. Krige continues this tradition with her latest creepy endeavor, She Will.

Krige portrays Veronica, an aging film star and recent double mastectomy recipient who retreats to a remote Scottish countryside inn with her nurse Desi (Kota Eberhardt) to recover in solitude. Veronica, however, gets more than she bargained for when the primal forces of revenge manifest in the lands around them, a location where witches were burned in 1722. The echoes of past sins haunt Veronica’s dreams as she bears witness to these heinous acts, forcing a long-overdue reckoning, as Veronica becomes a vessel for vengeance.

Krige recently spoke to The A.V. Club about her history with horror, crafting relatable characters, special effects make-up and the Borg Queen.

Alice Krige: First of all, I think it’s a very broad church. It’s a big umbrella. It lets you tell stories on the Texas Chainsaw Massacre sequel end of the spectrum, and it also embraces a story where the horror is much more internal, the nightmare of trauma and the damage it does to the human psyche … It’s not always graphic. There’s no blood, except in this movie there is one pool of blood. The horror is all internal. What is so potent in She Will is the exploration of the supernatural and the dimensions that we don’t acknowledge or explore. They are there, nevertheless. That is what is wonderful about horror. And, also, so often the stories are in a space where experiences are so heightened. For example, I was in a film which I think is remarkably beautiful called Gretel And Hansel. It’s the ultimate telling of a fairy tale. Everything is heightened and intensified and it allows you to paint in the deepest of colors. It allows for a very intense experience.

AVC: In a resume that includes Ghost Story, the campy Sleepwalkers and more recently, the gory Texas Chainsaw Massacre, what’s the appeal of working in those extremes?

AK: I’ve been told in the last few days that I work in the horror genre. I’m not aware of that at all. What I do is I am given a character to play and I am not thinking of the labels. I am thinking of who she is in the landscape and what her journey is, where she begins and where she ends. For example, in Gretel And Hansel, what a treat [it was] to be given those words as an expressive tool. But they are so heightened, as well. In this movie, She Will, you have the whole dimension of the cosmos and nature and the power of our origins. In all these instances, you are given something super real or super intense to explore, and you are exploring the human psyche within that. I kinda tend to strip away the labels. They don’t help. It’s all about who she is and her journey.

AVC: In She Will, how did you go about making your character Veronica relatable within this supernatural setting?

AK: You just try to find every moment. I don’t know how to describe it, but it’s what you do. I did a lot of research. I googled the burning of the witches in Scotland. Director Charlotte Colbert and I had a constant flow of exchange, and exchanging ideas and imagery. You listen to music. You look at art. You are constantly turning over every stone. You are allowing whatever intuitive faculty you have just to do work under the surface.

And I was given a great gift by a friend, a school friend. We were at school together when we were nine and 10. We’ve remained in touch. She went through something quite similar to Veronica. She had surgery, that was not quite as radical but, nevertheless, shocking. I called her and said, “Can you bear to tell me about it?” She said, “For sure, I can tell you.” She laid it out in graphic detail, everything that transpired. But she left me with something that became a very potent emblem or symbol for Charlotte and me. She said, “You have to rise like a phoenix from the ashes.” It was the end point for us of Veronica’s journey. She doesn’t start the journey thinking that’s her goal. It happens to her because of the young nurse, because of the power of our origins, of the Earth, of nature, of the cosmos and of the spirits of the departed. The wounds of the past completely take her on the most unexpected journey. She is ultimately able to shed the mask that has become fused to her.

AVC: As a performer, how do you feel horror has evolved since you started in it? Do you think She Will could have been made 20 years ago?

AK: That’s a really interesting question. I don’t know. There was a lot of artistic freedom in the ’80s. I’m very grateful the space still exists for someone to not be boxed in, that Charlotte was allowed the freedom to bring her sensibility as an artist, because she is a very accomplished fine artist, to bring that sensibility to film narrative. It’s a very different piece of work. It’s really quite unusual. You can’t fit it into a box.

I started off thinking of it as an onion, the layers of which you peeled. That’s wrong. It’s much more like a flower that slowly opens, petal by petal. The deeper you go in, the more layers reveal themselves and more threads of exploration. But then finally, the tapestry forms and the image emerges. You are left with something that is very coherent, even though you seem to be going off in an unexpected direction.

AVC: Your Star Trek experience was unique in that you were able to play the Borg Queen for more than one movie. How rewarding did it feel to stay with that character over the course of time and watch her evolve?

AK: It was very terrifying, frankly, to shift mediums, to shift from an enormous screen down to a television screen. I thought to myself, “Will she even work in this little space?” Two nights before, it dawned on me that I was working with two women and not two men. I called the producer and said, “She’s with two women.” He said, “Don’t worry. Think of her as omnisexual.” And I thought, “OK.” It was only after that I realized I didn’t know what omnisexual was. It was wonderful to experience her in a completely different context. And, quite frankly, no matter how many times they get rid of her, I think they are kidding themselves. She’s out there. She was created. She cannot be destroyed. What a fascinating character she is. I have never asked them, and I would love to know, if they had any idea she was going to become an absolute archetype. I had no idea whether they knew. I certainly didn’t. By the time they had put on the make-up and the suit, and I looked in the mirror, it wasn’t me anymore. I really did feel like I was just a channel and the Borg Queen walked up, did her thing and left.

AVC: Whether it’s a role like Veronica or the Borg Queen or the cat creature Mary in Sleepwalkers, how delicious is it to be around all the special effects make-up and the prosthetics and the gore?

AK: They have become so sophisticated now. The Borg Queen … what Scott Wheeler, who designed the head and the makeup, gave me … was an extraordinary gift. Think about it. You can’t imagine her separate from what she looked like. Not at all. I couldn’t have shown up and been the Borg Queen. That would have been ludicrous. That was who she was. I was given that. Film is the most collaborative of arts. I have been so blessed to work with the most generous and creative of collaboratives. It just goes on and on, the number of riches that I have been given by people I was working with. Special effects, prosthetics, if they are beautifully executed can be a doorway into a different reality.

I worked with Scott Wheeler again on an absolutely straight drama. I needed to age from about 45 to 80. By the end, I needed to have had a stroke. It’s a movie called Skin. Scott did those special effects, the prosthetics, at the end. It was such a blessing to be working with him. He is so good at what he does. Going from 45 to that old woman in the wheelchair was wonderful. He helped me chart the course of her life by what he contributed.

There is always this huge danger. We were filming in South Africa. Scott made those pieces in his lab, in the Valley, in Los Angeles. He came to South Africa with them all in a box. We shot that sequence right at the end of the movie. At the end of that day, he said to me, “Now I can tell you something that happened last night. I opened the box and all the spare pieces had disintegrated. The ones on your face are the only ones that survived.” I had a full set and when I put them on, I didn’t know if they would last until the end of the day. This was a complete anomaly. This had never happened to him before. Thank goodness he didn’t tell me.