Marin Ireland is poised for a big year. Earlier this summer, she brought a tooth-gritting intensity to her role in The Boogeyman, adapted from the Stephen King short story of the same name. As we head into the second half of the year, the two buzzy Sundance 2023 selections she appears in already have prime release dates and distributors.
In the sultry thriller Eileen, she delivers a riveting monologue opposite leading ladies Anne Hathaway and Thomasin McKenzie, which has already gotten her award season buzz. In Birth/Rebirth, she is the leading lady, alongside co-star Judy Reyes, in a menacingly maternal spin on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
After dozens of movies and TV appearances over the past 20 years, and witnessing friends and colleagues break through, 2023 could be her moment — but she isn't worried either way.
"I'm trying very hard to just be focusing exclusively on the gratitude," Ireland said in an interview with Mashable conducted ahead of the SAG/AFTRA strike. "I genuinely feel how beautiful those experiences were, and how lucky I feel just for those experiences, and to try not to get my expectations up."
Months after The Boogeyman scored at the box office and with critics, Birth/Rebirth is coming to theaters for a late-summer dose of harrowing horror. Co-written and directed by Laura Moss, the film follows a chilly and socially awkward coroner named Rose (Ireland) whose mad scientist-like experiments to raise the dead entangle her with an outspoken and maternal nurse named Celia (Judy Reyes). Fate — and science fiction — bring them together, but something stranger makes them friends.
Marin Ireland and Judy Reyes found their chemistry ahead of shooting Birth/Rebirth.
"The rehearsals were so helpful," Ireland said of finding the connection between these two very different characters, "because you can kind of theorize about it all you want. And then once you're in the room with the other person, it's like the alchemy — the sort of chemical relationship you have with each other in a room — suddenly, I didn't have to think about what that might be anymore, because Judy is so warm, and also such a force and so funny."
The plot is the stuff of life and death: two mothers working in envelope-pushing medicine to keep a resurrected child alive. The tone of the film is darkly hilarious, relishing the offbeat, buddy-comedy vibe that develops between two horror heroines forced to make increasingly grim choices.
"It made so much sense to me that they're both mothers in the story in different ways," Ireland said, referring to Celia being the resurrected child's biological mother while Rose is her mother like Dr. Frankenstein is to his monster. This distinction in the kinds of mothers they are made for dynamic discoveries in rehearsals. "There were times when I felt like a teenager to [Judy] as a mother, you know what I mean? And there are also ways like we were odd-coupling it a little bit…that kind of evolved organically. In the room, you really understand why [we rehearse and] the value of that, because it just starts to make its own chemical sense."
Birth/Rebirth's twisted premise attracted Marin Ireland.
For her part, Ireland was "thrilled" to step into the role of Rose. "I don't generate stuff myself," the actress explained, "so I always get really excited by something I could never have imagined. This was like, the best ever version of that."
"It already lights me up when [a role] is not just like 'the girlfriend' or 'the wife' or 'the mom' or whatever," Ireland said, alluding to the thankless sidekick parts that actresses are too often offered. "So, already, it wasn't going to be that. It was like, something that I could never have imagined is the thing that thrills me the most."
After checking out Moss's short films online — she particularly warmed to the humor of "Porn Without Sex," which features the cheesy setups of porn narratives without the typical next step — Ireland met with Moss over Zoom to discuss the movie. From there, she felt confident in signing on to play Rose. But as the film deals with death, gore, miscarriages, and more ob-gyn matters in a willfully uncomfortable way, Ireland anticipated challenges in shooting.
"I don't do well with gore and bloody stuff myself," Ireland admitted, noting she shies away from horror movies in her free time. "So, I was a little nervous about a lot of the autopsy stuff and all of the miscarriage stuff. The miscarriage stuff scared me."
On set, however, she found that "things didn't bother me that I expected. The autopsy stuff was easy peasy. Pretty fun, because [the props and visual effects were] made so beautifully. And it just, like, looked so cool. That stuff was all incredible."
As she'd predicted, the scene following the miscarriage was emotionally difficult, as she carried out the grisly details of clean-up, feigning Rose's apathy while suppressing her own distress. One thing that hadn't scared her on the page became a challenge on the day of filming: the self-insemination scene.
Marin Ireland reveals the most harrowing scene she shot in Birth/Rebirth.
In Birth/Rebirth, Rose procures semen in an unconventional way, then injects it into herself to spur a pregnancy to create the biological materials demanded by her experiments. The scene itself is modestly shot, and yet it's such a deeply private moment that it is hard to watch — kind of like spying on someone's most secret self.
"Even though you didn't even see [anything] and [the injection] wasn't going into my actual body, that was really hard," Ireland said. "For me, that was actually probably the hardest thing I shot. Even though it wasn't going into my body, like having to sort of imagine injecting myself with someone else's — that was really difficult… It definitely snuck up on me."
Making Birth/Rebirth forced Marin Ireland to relate to her controversial character.
"I felt like I was taking a big swing as an actor," she said of her work in Birth/Rebirth, "so I felt nervous a lot more after shooting scenes. I really had to trust Laura. I kept asking, 'You got to tell me, because I'm just trying stuff. I'm doing what I hear and see in my head, right?'''
Moss and Ireland used the metaphor of a dial as shorthand for how to pinpoint where Rose — who has extreme difficulty interacting with others — would be in her emotional range. "We talked the dial — like how much she's engaging, and how much she's on overload, and how much she just can't, and all of that stuff. It was a big swing for me. It was new territory, in a lot of ways."
In the film, Rose makes decisions that are sure to have audiences shocked and awed. While Ireland correctly anticipated the joy she'd have in sinking her teeth into such a provocative character, she also found herself relating to Rose's plight. Not in the unethical medical stuff, but in that both she and Rose signed onto to a project, thinking they understood what it would demand of them, and learning on the fly the new challenges that would arise.
"It was actually a simpler way to relate to her," Ireland said of the experience. "Laura and I talked about that." Chiefly, however, Ireland found empathy for Rose by thinking of her as a child. "It's thinking of her as someone who parented herself," she explained, "and then just wanted to have this one thing and wanted to be able to do it right, and do it well, and not mess it up…Like, [her] inner child was really running the show."
Relishing in finding the character is how Ireland has learned to cope with an industry that can be unpredictable and in which actors have so little power. Speaking with the possibility of the actor's strike looming — but not yet announced — she said, "I always expect to get cut out of movies, or that they'll never actually come out, or whatever it is. And I try really hard to enjoy the process of making them and to just be grateful for that moment. And to think of it as my own sort of evolution as an artist and 'What is this giving me in this moment?'"
With the theatrical releases of both Birth/Rebirth and Eileen ahead of her, she reflected, "I was just really grateful that they were both really beautiful artistic experiences," adding, "I'm trying to just focus on that and not get my expectations too high. And at the same time, I feel really proud of my work. I can stand behind it 1,000%. And that's really rare. That's a big deal."
Birth/Rebirth opens in theaters Aug. 18.
Eileen is slated for release Dec. 1.
The Boogeyman comes to digital Aug. 29.
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