Mary Elizabeth Winstead Interview For ‘The Thing’

Antarctica: an extraordinary continent of awesome beauty. It is also home to an isolated outpost where a discovery full of scientific possibility becomes a mission of survival when an alien is unearthed by a crew of international scientists. The shape-shifting creature, accidentally unleashed at this marooned colony, has the ability to turn itself into a perfect replica of any living being. It can look just like you or me, but inside, it remains inhuman. In the thriller ‘The Thing,’ paranoia spreads like an epidemic among a group of researchers as they’re infected, one by one, by a mystery from another planet.

Palaeontologist Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) has travelled to the desolate region for the expedition of her lifetime. Joining a Norwegian scientific team that has stumbled across an extraterrestrial ship buried in the ice, she discovers an organism that seems to have died in the crash eons ago. But it is about to wake up. When a simple experiment frees the alien from its frozen prison, Kate must join the crew’s pilot, Carter (Joel Edgerton), to keep it from killing them off one at a time. And in this vast, intense land, a parasite that can mimic anything it touches will pit human against human as it tries to survive and flourish. ‘The Thing’ serves as a prelude to John Carpenter’s classic 1982 film of the same name. The film also stars Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Ulrich Thomsen, Paul Braunstein, Stig Henrik Hoff and Eric Christian Olsen. ’The Thing’ opens in cinemas October 14th in the US, and December 2nd in the UK. Look out for a more in-depth interview closer to the films release date.

Can you tell us a little bit about your character in ‘The Thing,’ Kate?

Mary Elizabeth Winstead: I play Kate Lloyd in the film, she’s a young palaeontologist, she’s starting out on her career. She gets an offer to work with this renowned scientist, to go to Antarctica and locate this fossilised specimen, so she’s really excited and honoured to go up there. Then when she gets there she finds that its a bit of a can of worms that she wasn’t expecting to get a part of – all hell breaks loose (laughs).

The team of Norwegians, and also Americans that come into it when they find this Alien frozen in the ice, it’s initially extremely exciting. There first thought is, We are going to be rich and famous – we’ve found an alien, this is unbelievable!’ The scientist Sander, who’s kind of heading up the whole expedition, he decides he wants to drill into it and perform tests on it. My character Kate is like, ‘This seems a little illogical, this seems a little impulsive, we should go about this in a proper way, get it to an environment that could better handle this situation.’ But he’s a little greedy and anxious. So once they do that…..it’s out (laughs). It breaks free and basically starts taking over the bodies of the people at this base. It gets to the point where nobody knows who’s a Human, or who’s an Alien or a “Thing.” This mistrust and paranoia starts creeping through all of the people and through all of their minds – everybody starts losing it a little bit.

Trust is definitely a big theme in the film…

Mary Elizabeth Winstead: Oh yeah, it’s one of those universal themes of who can we trust, and what happens when we lose all of our trust in someone, when we can’t trust anyone around us. How does that affect us, and what will we do if that happens, and what kind of chaos can permeate in that kind of situation? So it’s definitely a scary thing when you feel there’s somebody you can’t trust, even if your wrong you can drive yourself crazy that way – that’s sort of what happens in the film (laughs). You never know who is or who isn’t, but no matter what, people are gonna die basically – it’s going to be a horrific thing.

One of the things I really enjoyed about this film was thinking, ‘Who’s going to survive, and if they do, how will they get out of this?’

Mary Elizabeth Winstead: No one is safe, this “thing” is dreadful, it’s scary, and it seems impossible to escape. So there is that feeling of, ‘How the hell are they going to survive this?!’ (Laughs) It definitely keeps you on the edge of your seat.

The original movie was an all male cast, the fact that there’s a female lead adds an interesting dynamic to film. Also that your on a Norwegian base, that really brings out the mistrust and paranoia between the Americans and Norwegians…

Mary Elizabeth Winstead: Yeah, the original is an all male cast, which is a really interesting thing, it is really cool to see a film with an all male cast. But I think with this film we really wanted to set ourselves apart from that, this isn’t a remake, it’s a real prequel. It’s about completely different characters, completely different people in the same situation. To me having a female lead kind of immediately says, ‘This isn’t a remake, we are doing something different, and we are bringing in a different dynamic.’

The fact that it’s a Norwegian base, I think for my character, as well as the other Americans characters, it sort of adds to the whole paranoia of it, because they’re saying things you don’t understand, their talking to each other and you don’t know if they are forming some sort of alliance against you. It really does build up the tension.