Mike Flanagan was a bullied kid. He figured that gave him a way in.
I asked him about the teenagers he brought into the writers’ room for Carrie.
“My misconception was that I was a bullied kid in high school,” Flanagan told me during the Carrie press day. “I felt those pressures, and so I assumed that I had a point of reference that was comparable to what kids go through, and I was wrong.”
That’s quite a thing to hear from the person adapting horror’s most famous bullying story. Flanagan is the showrunner, writer and director of the series, which premieres on Prime Video October 7. He and Stephen King are executive producers. Summer H. Howell plays Carrie White. Samantha Sloyan plays Margaret White.
Over five conversations with Flanagan and the ensemble, that admission kept coming back in different shapes.
Modernizing the nightmare
Mike Flanagan said the adults in the room all made the same error. “We believe we understand kind of what modern high schoolers are going through simply because we were in high school ourselves,” he said, “and so we assume it must be the same.”
What changed his mind was listening to the teens “who are brave enough to come in and really talk to us about what they go through every day.”
Some of it would be familiar to any King reader. Flanagan called high school the place “where cruelty kind of hits an apex,” where kids are “dealing with the horror of our own bodies and identities as we’re developing.” That’s the novel’s home turf.
The difference is what happens after the cruelty starts.
“When I was in high school, all of that was private,” Flanagan said. “It was confined just to the walls of that school, to the people who happened to be around.”
Now he sees a generation that has to move through life “knowing that at their most vulnerable and critical kind of time of their life, all of their torments, all of their mistakes can be enshrined digitally forever in full view of the entire world.”
Enshrined is a heavy word for a cafeteria humiliation. It’s also accurate.
Cruelty that looks like a joke
Alison Thornton plays Chris Hargensen, and Josie Totah plays her friend Tina. I asked how they made that friendship feel real when the two can be funny together while doing something cruel.
Totah credited Flanagan’s “so nuanced” scripts and said “our natural friendship helped soften the meanness of it all.”
“A lot of bullying comes from humor and comes from taking jokes too far and things that people will kind of mask under humor,” Thornton said. “Chris repeats a few times in the show, ‘It was a joke.’ But it really wasn’t.”
Anyone who survived a group chat knows that defense.
Thornton said social media “can spread information and connect people, and it can also be a very dark place and it can be weaponized.” She pointed to distance as the accelerant. “People, I think, feel more empowered to be mean online because it can be anonymous and they’re not necessarily directly seeing the person that they’re affecting.”
Put that next to Flanagan’s point about permanence and you get the modern version of the problem. The joke is easier to make. It’s harder to take back.
Thornton also refused to play Chris as a cartoon. “As mean as Chris is, she’s also in so much pain, and a lot of her decision-making just comes from a place of desperation,” she said. “It really doesn’t have much to do with Carrie.”
Nobody gets to be just one thing
That refusal runs through the whole ensemble.
Arthur Conti plays Billy Nolan. Joel Oulette plays Tommy Ross. Conti said he wanted Billy “likable” and “charismatic and interesting.” Then he put it plainly: “Nobody is one thing or the other. Nobody is completely black and white, good or evil.”
His read on Billy: “I think Billy just needed maybe more kindness in his life.”
Oulette’s takeaway for viewers was simple. “Always look out for everyone. The little person, you know? Just be caring.”
Amber Midthunder, who plays Miss Desjardin, said Carrie “sort of holds up a mirror to a lot of people in an uncomfortable but also necessary way.” She quoted a line from her character: “I liked her, but she really frustrated me.” Then she flipped it back on the rest of us. “What is it that we think that person needs to be changed and not that we need to be kinder?”
That’s the question Carrie has always asked. Midthunder just said it out loud.
Margaret is the hardest test of the idea. Samantha Sloyan didn’t soften her. She located the harm inside the love. “So many of the times that she’s doing something that’s hurtful to Carrie, she really believes that it’s helping her, but it’s really helping Margaret more.”
Summer H. Howell came at the same relationship from Carrie’s side. She said Carrie “trusts her parents so much,” and that seeing how differently she was raised “makes her question things.”
Why remake Carrie at all?
“There was no point at all in trying to improve upon or supplant De Palma’s classic, or even to mess with the book,” Mike Flanagan said. “So the only reason to approach the story was to try to do something that was ours, to try to take it apart into all of its little pieces and use those to build something new.”
He said it clicked once they had “flipped and inverted Carrie White, Margaret White, and Chris Hargensen kind of away from the characterizations that I’d always experienced as a fan.” Then Summer H. Howell stepped in. “I’ve never seen that Carrie before, ever,” Flanagan said. “This was our Carrie. It wasn’t a regurgitation. It was something different.”
He followed that with a shrug I appreciated. “And we’ll see how people feel about that.”
Samantha Sloyan, who knew the book and film, said letting go of them wasn’t hard because Flanagan “had decided that this just starts from a different foundational place of a loving mother-daughter. And so that changes everything for me.” It “untethered” her from earlier portrayals while letting her still admire them.
Arthur Conti went further and stayed away from John Travolta entirely. “I love John Travolta, and I knew that even if I didn’t mean to, I would internalize the performance and copy,” he said. “I wanted it to be completely my own.” Joel Oulette didn’t read the book until afterward.
“It has to be different,” Conti said. “It has to be a new interpretation. Otherwise why do it?”
Nobody I spoke with sounded worried about the shadow. “If we as actors go into a project worried about an end result, we can’t do our job,” said Matthew Lillard, who plays Principal Grayle. “‘In Mike Flanagan we trust’ is a real thing.”
Carrie has always been about what happens when cruelty finds someone isolated. When King published the novel in 1974, that cruelty had to travel by word of mouth. Flanagan’s starting point is that it doesn’t anymore. It gets screenshotted and saved. It gets called a joke. And it follows a kid home.
Whether the series lands that is for viewers to decide. What came through in every room was a production that started by admitting what it didn’t know.
