Wolf Man Star Julia Garner Opens Up About the Freaky New Film

Actor Julia Garner has starred in a variety of thrilling movies, with one of her first roles being in the cannibalistic remake of We Are What We Are, while 2023’s The Royal Hotel wasn’t jam-packed with outright terror, but explored a highly tense vacation that went wrong at a variety of levels. Her latest movie, Wolf Man, manages to incorporate some psychological anxiety into an experience that harkens back to seminal components of the genre, as she faces off against a character undergoing a monstrous transformation. Additionally, her character undergoes some emotional tension in her life before ever encountering a beastly presence. Wolf Man is set to hit theaters on January 17th.

In the film, Garner plays Charlotte, a woman who has been focusing on her career, which puts strain on her marriage to Blake (Christopher Abbott). The specifics of the relationship mean the actors were tasked with conveying both emotional distance and intimacy.

“We had quite a bit of rehearsal and, with the rehearsal, it was a lot of talking about the relationship and what it used to be and how it got to that place where it is in the film, at the moment. We just discussed it a lot, we had quite a bit of rehearsal,” the actor shared with ComicBook.

In regards to how the monster movie compares to her previous genre efforts, she added, “This project, to me, is actually different than any other project that I’ve done, even in the past, because there’s much more action. And then it is very tense, but there’s a lot of action in this movie. There’s a lot of running. It’s a little scarier because it’s actually happening, but yeah, it was super fun.”

[RELATED – Wolf Man Star Christopher Abbott Talks Becoming a Creature of the Night]

Wolf Man is described, “What if someone you loved became something else? From Blumhouse and visionary writer-director Leigh Whannell, the creators of the chilling modern monster tale The Invisible Man, comes a terrifying new lupine nightmare: Wolf Man. Golden Globe nominee Christopher Abbott (Poor Things, It Comes at Night) stars as Blake, a San Francisco husband and father, who inherits his remote childhood home in rural Oregon after his own father vanishes and is presumed dead. With his marriage to his high-powered wife, Charlotte (Emmy winner Julia Garner; Ozark, Inventing Anna), fraying, Blake persuades Charlotte to take a break from the city and visit the property with their young daughter, Ginger (Matlida Firth; Hullraisers, Coma).

“But as the family approaches the farmhouse in the dead of night, they’re attacked by an unseen animal and, in a desperate escape, barricade themselves inside the home as the creature prowls the perimeter. As the night stretches on, however, Blake begins to behave strangely, transforming into something unrecognizable, and Charlotte will be forced to decide whether the terror within their house is more lethal than the danger without. The film co-stars Sam Jaeger (The Handmaid’s Tale), Ben Prendergast (The Sojourn Audio Drama), and Benedict Hardie (The Invisible Man).”

Complicating the filming process further is that, while the movie unfolded under a short period of time, it was shot out of sequence. This meant Garner and the rest of the cast had to quickly be able to get into the mindset of their characters at disparate points of their journey with short notice.

“Well, shooting out of sequence is always hard, and that’s why you always have to almost, like, memorize a script, just so that you can know it in your bones,” the actor detailed. “I read the script fully, multiple times, but then I also read it almost every night, just different pages every night, too, when I get home. And also ten pages before what we have to shoot the next day.”

Wolf Man lands in theaters on January 17th.

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