Pod Insights Pop Culture Happy Hour The Housemaid About this episode The twisty thriller The Housemaid stars Sydney Sweeney as a newly hired live-in housekeeper to Amanda Seyfried’s wealthy housewife. Both women have dark secrets, and their dynamic goes downhill real fast. It’s directed by Paul Feig of Bridesmaids and A Simple Favor, so you know it’s going to be a bizarre, fun ride.
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0:20 Aisha Harris? The twisty psychological thriller The Housemaid was a huge bestseller, so it was only a matter of time before it was turned into a film. And it's quite the movie. Sydney Sweeney plays a newly hired live-in housekeeper to Amanda Seyfried's wealthy housewife. But both women have dark secrets, and their employer-employee dynamic goes downhill real fast. It's directed by Paul Feig, who's made movies like Bridesmaids and A Simple Flavor, so you know it's going to be a bizarre, very fun ride. I'm Ayesha Harris, and today we're talking about The Housemaid on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.
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2:16 Aisha Harris? Joining me today is Jordan Cruciola. She's a writer and producer and the host of the podcast Feeling Seen on Maximum Fun. Hey, Jordan.
2:24 Speaker 03 Hello. Thrilled to be here on the Paul Feig beat today.
2:27 Aisha Harris? Yes, welcome, welcome. Also with us is Vulture TV critic Roxana Hadadi. Hey, Roxana.
2:33 Speaker 04 Hello. Thank you for having me.
2:35 Aisha Harris? Yes, I am so excited to talk about this movie. Especially with you two, this is gonna be very fun. So yeah, in The Housemaid, Sidney Sweeney plays Millie, a young woman with a checkered past and who's struggling to make ends meet. She lands what seems like a pretty clutch gig as a live-in housekeeper for wealthy couple Nina and Andrew Winchester, played by Amanda Seyfried and Brendan Sklinar. Now, it doesn't take too long before the dream job becomes a nightmare, though, because Nina is very unpredictable and prone to violent outbursts.
3:07 Speaker 05 I have to get up and do a speech in front of everybody, and now I have nothing.
3:13 Aisha Harris? Oh, and to complicate things even further, there's definitely some heat between Millie and Andrew. As Nina's behavior grows more and more erratic, though, things spin out of control, secrets are revealed, and Millie has to fight for her life. Yes, this movie, I love it. It's in theaters now. Roxana, I'm gonna start with you.
3:34 Speaker 04 Yeah.
3:34 Aisha Harris? Give me your first impressions of The Housemaid.
3:37 Speaker 04 It started with me being like, what is this even? It is not working for me. And then there is a point, like a third of the way through, where I was like, actually, this is genius filmmaking, and maybe we should make new Oscars for what is happening in The Housemaid. But like, I'm very susceptible to this sort of thing, right? Like, I really liked The Hunting Wives, I liked Sirens. We sort of had this resurgence of sort of like, high camp, high trash TV this year. The Girlfriend, All Her Fault, I'm gonna keep going. I feel very fond of this. Genre, I think, and I really enjoyed this. I feel like sort of like the women's domestic thriller
4:22 Speaker 04 got very self-serious and somber for a while, which I understand because the genre is often dealing with like domestic violence and domestic abuse and a lot of the difficulties of having it all. Like, I understand all of that. But I do think that there is like a certain amount of very dark humor in this movie that I found to be very fun. And once it had sort of like won me over, it had like fully won me over.
4:56 Aisha Harris? I love to hear it. Jordan, the housemaid, thoughts?
5:00 Speaker 03 As someone who put together an entire, like, capsule podcast dedicated to a simple favor, this is Paul Feig operating in my favorite mode of his, even as good as The Heat and Bridesmaids and Spy are. This is my favorite Paul Feig, like paperback airport novel Paul Feig with like ladies at the center doing harm to each other in inventive and at times homoerotic ways. Watching this movie in a theater was so much fun, coming at the end of a year, right when we're about to get The Testament of Anne Lee.
5:43 Speaker 04 Yeah.
5:43 Speaker 03 Amanda Seyfried could be in Oscar contention for both, honestly. Those eyes are telling to such incredibly different stories. You are seeing the dynamic nature of an Oscar caliber actor right before our eyes. And after the year that Sydney Sweeney has had, to close it out with the perfect lane for Sydney Sweeney to exist in.
6:07 Speaker 04 Yeah.
6:08 Speaker 03 Feels like getting the kick in at the end of the run at the track meet and closing it down to end up on the podium.
6:17 Aisha Harris? Yeah.
6:17 Speaker 03 Somehow Brandon Skelner is what I think I had always thought Scott Eastwood might be.
6:23 Speaker 04 Yes, they have the same face. It's so unnerving.
6:26 Speaker 03 Yeah, the promise of that kind of, I wasn't sure if what he was doing was working for me in the movie. And then a pivotal point happens and I was like, it's all fallen into place for me. So chemistry, magic, madness.
6:40 Speaker 03 I'm all in, five bagger.
6:41 Speaker 04 Cinema, Jordan said cinema.
6:43 Speaker 03 Cinema, yes.
6:45 Aisha Harris? Yes, this is a movie that absolutely benefits from being seen with a bunch of people.
6:51 Speaker 04 Yeah.
6:51 Aisha Harris? We always talk about the Blackbusters, it's like, oh, you want to see on a big screen because it's visually set, no, sometimes you just want to see a movie where other people are gonna make the same noises that you are when something weird happens.
7:02 Speaker 04 Yes.
7:03 Aisha Harris? Who are gonna laugh at the same stuff that you do.
7:05 Speaker 04 Yeah, the press screening I went to was like a mixed press and public screening, heavily women. And I just, A, found this movie so much more effective and entertaining and even moving. And the crowd was having such a good time that it is the kind of thing where you're like, we used to have these in the nineties, like, we used to have a lot of these in the nineties.
7:28 Aisha Harris? We did.
7:29 Speaker 04 And this is my embraced tradition, return to your roots.
7:35 Speaker 03 I'm a cinema traditionalist.
7:36 Speaker 04 Hundred percent, yes. If you just want to like text a lot of friends you haven't hung out with in a while, the housemate is the way to do it.
7:44 Speaker 03 Yes.
7:45 Aisha Harris? Oh my goodness, yes. This was exactly what I wanted and what I needed. I love these types of movies. And I think you both are so right that there's this idea that this kind of movie needs to be a little bit more serious and more grave as it is about what it really means. And I think sometimes we need that escapism and to go back to the era of your Fatal Attractions and those types of things, like, I want that.
8:09 Speaker 03 Give me a bunny boiler, give me a bunny boiler.
8:11 Aisha Harris? Yes, yes. We don't get a bunny boiler, but we do get China, like.
8:15 Speaker 04 Oh my god.
8:16 Aisha Harris? Pieces of China.
8:18 Speaker 04 Yeah.
8:19 Aisha Harris? The family heirloom that is very crucial to plot points in this movie. But I do want to talk about the Sydney Sweeney of it all, because I had this sort of same thought going into it, Jordan, of like this being kind of perfect for her. And, I mean, let's just talk about the way this, her career has gone this year. You know, she appeared in a controversial ad campaign for American Eagle earlier this year with a tagline, Sydney Sweeney has great jeans, jeans as in denim, sure. But it caused an uproar because the ads were using wordplay that evoked eugenics, just bluntly speaking. It also surfaced this year that she's a registered Republican voter in Florida. And so you've got that. And then her boxing biopic movie, Christie, which has been clearly her play.
9:04 Aisha Harris? Like if Testament of Ann Lee is Amanda Seyfried's play for Oscar, like Christie is is kind of Sydney Sweeney's. And that did poorly at the box office, some say, because she gave this sort of non-answer about her jeans ad in an interview with GQ. And then also her like her perceived political alignment. So this idea that we're like assigning something to her personal life has maybe affected her box office chances. That's what they're saying. So now she's like addressed the campaign directly. I was gonna forget about this. I don't know about you. I was kind of like, okay, whatever. I'd forgotten about it, but now she has this movie that she's trying to promote. And she did an interview with People Magazine where she said, quote, "I don't support the views. Some people chose to connect to the campaign.
9:47 Aisha Harris? Many have assigned motives and labels to me that just aren't true." And she also added, "I'm against hate and divisiveness." Okay, so after seeing the house, me.
9:58 Aisha Harris? Which is something I find find interesting because people, some people are very focused on her personal life and her supposed political alignments. But then the movies she's in tend to be these types of movies that are very much like, if not flat-out feminist, they are about women sort of overcoming the patri- I even think of like the nun movie that she did.
10:19 Speaker 03 Immaculate.
10:19 Aisha Harris? Immaculate, yes.
10:20 Speaker 03 If all the registered Republicans in Hollywood, of which there are many y'all, want to make independent movies about domestic abuse surviving lesbians who are also boxers, like then I would be happy for them to channel their tax cut money into that kind of forum. But Sydney Sweeney, I think in terms of a of a Hollywood element, of a screen presence, she is so good in this, she is so good in Immaculate, she is so good as Cassie in Euphoria. And she is really good in the movie The Voyeurs.
10:52 Speaker 04 Yeah, The Voyeurs is good.
10:53 Aisha Harris? Oh, I totally forgot about that movie.
10:54 Speaker 03 Sydney Sweeney is great in also a dime store, a paperback airport movie.
11:02 Speaker 03 Exploitation thriller. I would love to see her commit to this lane. I think she's absolutely got a go for it in her that is really suitable for, yes, and the physical packaging that comprises like the totality of Sydney Sweeney fits really well in this space as well. And she knows that too, which is why she takes these roles and plays into the hilt the way that she does. In pure terms of screen presence, I think there was role selection that was a bit out of step for what's in her wheelhouse. So, you know, a movie like Eden, I don't know if that's something where she's like the best fit, but something like this, give me drama, give me screams, give me thrills, give me, give me what the Hunting Wives audience wants, because that is who I am and that is what I want.
11:43 Aisha Harris? Yeah.
11:45 Aisha Harris? I mean, Roxana, what say you?
11:47 Speaker 04 Yeah.
11:48 Aisha Harris? I mean, I do think there is something to be said that we're talking about this movie and this kind of movie, and we're not really talking about Christie. And I don't think Christie was the right movie for her. I never fully bought into her playing that role. But I can also understand being young and wanting to stretch, attempt to stretch your chops.
12:08 Speaker 04 Yeah, I mean, like, her personal or political life or whatever is like a black hole upon which we project many things. My personal feeling about her as an actress is I think that she has a limited range that in this film is perfect for what this film is asking her to do.
12:31 Aisha Harris? Exactly.
12:31 Speaker 04 She's playing a young woman who is unhoused, does not have any job opportunities, has a quick temper. And I think all of that comes through really well in the characterization of like this young woman who seems pretty aimless, clearly has sort of a moral core. But honestly, is like, pretty reactive and pretty passive.
12:58 Speaker 03 Yeah.
12:59 Speaker 04 This is not meant to be an insult, I'm so sorry, but she's very good at that sort of like, dead-eyed affect. And that sort of like, very deadpan line delivery. And for this film, which is asking Amanda Seyfried to do huge, over-the-top, like, mood swing acting, having Sydney Sweeney be the blank, quote-unquote, "normal" character. For a long time in this movie, is super effective to get the contrast between the two of them. Which, again, I do want to insist, like, in my eyes, is limited.
13:37 Speaker 03 Yes.
13:38 Speaker 04 But in this kind of lane, it is perfect.
13:41 Speaker 03 Yeah.
13:41 Speaker 04 And I think it's the most self-aware performance from her that I've seen.
13:46 Speaker 03 Yeah. There's not a problem with being a specific talent.
13:50 Speaker 04 Yeah.
13:51 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah. To compare her talent to that of like, and Amanda Seyfried. And be like, these two actors should be the same thing, is absolutely not the case. And you look at what Paul Feig did in A Simple Favor, bringing us the best performance of Blake Lively's career. And tapping into something that someone who, in the Simple Favor podcast that we had, Blake Lively, said in her own words, being like, "I'm not Meryl Streep." For me, it's the costumes and all the finishings and the touches that really helped me bring out a specific character. She's aware of the lane that she occupies. In a similar case to like a Blake Lively, Sydney Sweeney is very aware that the physical presence that they have, like, the way they present these stunning white women, I'm not crying for these rich, very well-off white women, who are doing fine. They are aware of the perception of them.
14:34 Speaker 03 And you have the choice to either go along completely with the perception in a sort of complicit way. You have the choice to wink, wink, nudge, nudge, play within it, which is a really difficult line to walk, which I think is what Sydney accomplishes in something like this, and something like Boyer's especially. Or you have the choice to buck against it and be like, that's not me. I'm not that girl. Because you do want to defy the box that you are being put in because Hollywood still loves a box. If that is not your journey, if that's not your path to break out of that box that you're being put in and really find that kind of thriving success and a more dynamic sort of career, then you're gonna like have some slings and arrows as you learn the hard way that that's maybe not necessarily the most beneficial choice for your career decisions, your role choices. Listen, it would be cool to be super hot for a couple of days, but I honestly wouldn't want the life.
15:20 Speaker 03 Because that's the sort of celebrity that like you don't get a pick when you turn it on and turn it off. I would probably get really frustrated with the way that people were coming at me with the presumptions and access to who I am. And I'd be like, well, I'm gonna show you. And I would probably make some decisions that weren't probably in line with what I was best at in this world, because I was gonna try to prove to other people that I wasn't just this hot body shell. Because that probably sucks. That probably sucks. And so you're like, I'm gonna be a lesbian box with a mullet. And like, I get that. I get that.
15:47 Aisha Harris? I mean, she's still young, right? She's not even thirty yet.
15:50 Speaker 04 Yeah, younger than Timothée, right? Younger than Chalamet. I think we always forget that Chalamet is a little older, like within this realm of new Hollywood. Yeah.
16:00 Aisha Harris? Yes, and younger than Zendaya too. So it's, I agree with everything you've said about this. And I would also throw someone like Dakota Johnson in here, where I'm just like, you are very good at one specific thing. And when you're cast against that, I'm like, hmm, maybe not. But I'm not gonna fault them per se for like trying to do that, because why wouldn't you try to do that? I do wanna talk more about sort of Amanda Seyfried, because I do think that she does have the harder role here, because this is a very big performance.
16:35 Speaker 04 Yeah.
16:35 Aisha Harris? And she's so good at it. Like, she can,
16:38 Speaker 03 She's so good in this movie.
16:39 Aisha Harris? She can really dance that line. And there are so many twists and turns in this movie. And, you know, some of them, as someone who's watched so many of these, even though I haven't read the novel that this is based off of, I kind of saw them coming. But nevertheless, I was still very, very just enraptured with the way this performance plays out and the way that Paul Feig. Really just kind of plays up how silly all of this is. This is the type of movie, I feel like, once you realize this is deliberately silly in many ways. Like, there's so many moments where there's jump scares, where all of a sudden Amanda Seyfried's character is just like standing there like behind the mirror and it's like, oh, and it's like very, it's very.
17:20 Speaker 04 Yes, she's just looming, ghostly energy.
17:23 Speaker 03 Yeah, looming, a looming Amanda Seyfried.
17:25 Aisha Harris? There's the creepy groundskeeper, Enzo.
17:27 Speaker 04 Yes.
17:27 Aisha Harris? He's played by Michaela Maroney. Their dynamic is very great.
17:30 Speaker 03 Famously of the Megan Fox/Phenbot movie that came out last year, in which he played, like, you know, just the helpless dad that Phenbot Megan Fox had to come in and help domestically. He's been here before, he knows a housemaid situation.
17:42 Aisha Harris? Yes, he has Elaine too, and he's sticking to it. I love it. What do we think of sort of this dynamic between Amanda Seyfried and Sydney Sweeney? And how that kind of plays with expectations, I think, without getting too much into spoilers, because this does get very twisty. But I found it very enjoyable and very satisfying.
18:03 Speaker 04 The thing that is very smart about this movie, and it might be this way in the novel too, which I have not read, but what the movie does so well is it takes all these, like, very recognizable, like, trope-y elements of this genre at this point, and like, winks at you the whole time. The groundskeeper that is just sort of like staring through windows and like, maybe spying on these women, like, that's very unclear. The gaggle of like awful neighborhood moms.
18:33 Speaker 03 Paul loves a gaggle of moms.
18:35 Aisha Harris? Pick a little, talk a little.
18:36 Speaker 04 Yeah, and they're just like gossiping the whole time.
18:39 Speaker 03 Oh, my God, I'm so sorry. I really thought she was pregnant. We were all thinking it. I mean, have you seen her skin? I mean, how about those roots? My God, you think she would take better care of herself for Andrew?
18:49 Speaker 04 The fact that the daughter that Sydney Sweeney's character is now sort of expected to babysit doesn't like her at all. No shoes on the furniture.
19:00 Aisha Harris? She's so great. I wrote in my notes, she makes great shady faces. She's played by Indiana L.
19:05 Speaker 04 Yeah, she makes wonderful shady faces. She makes Sydney Sweeney's character make her a bologna sandwich, and then is like, I'm not hungry. Like, all of these things are, if you've even read, like, one of these books, you're completely aware of like, oh, these are all the puzzle pieces. And eventually, they will be rearranged into something really interesting. And I do think that, as we talked about, like, Sweeney being so passive. And Amanda doing so much, it is this great like push-pull conflict contentious energy. So then when the movie flips, you then realize that their dynamic has to flip. And I think that's like where the genius of the contrasting performances is.
19:49 Speaker 04 I do want to say there's this moment where Amanda Seyfried's character is in her SUV and she's doing a classic move that we all recognize where she goes from sobbing maniacally to laughing maniacally. And it takes like a certain kind of actor to pull that off. But I remember watching that and being like, could this woman be Joker? Like, could we like, what kind of villainy could we put this woman in? And I thought that was really fun. Let's not forget she played Elizabeth Holmes. Yeah, yeah. She should have won every award for that. So I also think that she is just sort of like, I mean, obviously she is A-list, but I think she's the kind of actress who can
20:30 Speaker 04 do so much. And it's interesting that this sort of like B-movie genre film paired with Testament of Ann Lee finally feels like the moment where you're like, oh, like Mean Girls and Veronica Mars star Amanda Seyfried has the range. And I just think that's really fun. Yeah.
20:51 Speaker 03 An actress she reminds me the most of, I think, is very, very established, just like sort of A-list in the mind, is Julianne Moore, who also, if there's one person who's filmography is balanced between like prestige dazzle you and absolute junk dazzle you, it is Julianne Moore. Her curation is so broad in her career. They meet in the middle, in the movie Chloe. In the bisexual exploitation movie Chloe, there are like the two wolves that are within you. It's like watching a movie like Chloe and watching a movie like, you know, say even Jennifer's Body, where Amanda Seyfried is the straight man character to the more vamped up Megan Fox. Amanda Seyfried has been on the opposite side. She's been the Sydney Sweeney
21:36 Speaker 03 in this dynamic, in another like girl-to-hander, sort of pulpy genre movie of this sort of sort. It makes me so happy to watch an actress getting older and having cooler opportunities that are higher profile, that showcase like the quiet choices she's been making to smaller audiences for a long time. That's an arc that just makes my heart soar.
21:59 Aisha Harris? Yeah. Yeah. I feel like anytime I see Amanda Seyfried is going to be in a movie, I'm going to be in good hands. Like, it doesn't really matter what kind of role she's playing. She's just always going to be that good. I, I love this.
22:14 Speaker 03 If you bought Big Love stock, y'all, we are cashing in. It is cashing in.
22:19 Aisha Harris? I think that is the perfect way to end this episode. Tell us what you think about The Housemaid. Find us on Facebook at facebook.com/PCHH and on Letterboxd at letterboxd.com/NPRPopCulture. We'll have a link to that in our episode description and go see it in a theater. Okay. And that brings us to the end of our show. Jordan Cruciola, Roxana Hadadi, thanks so much for being here. This was, as always, a delight.
22:44 Speaker 03 What a thrill. A perfect thrill.
22:46 Aisha Harris? Yes, thank you. This episode was produced by Liz Metzger, Kayla Lattimore, Mike Katsev, and edited by our showrunner Jessica Reedy. Hello, Come In provides our theme music. And thanks for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Aisha Harris, and we'll see you all next time.
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