‘NOS4A2’ Star Ashleigh Cummings Breaks Down Vic’s First Big Showdown With Charlie Manx

Vic McQueen (Ashleigh Cummings) shares a few traits with classic film actor Steve McQueen. She rides a motorcycle for one, is hot-headed, and is the hero of the story — in this case, AMC’s horror series NOS4A2. But she’s also an 18-year old girl, dealing with a nearly immortal psychic vampire who kidnaps children named Charlie Manx (Zachary Quinto), something I think Steve McQueen never had to tackle.

And particularly in the past two weeks of the show, including this week’s episode “The Wraith,” Vic has been dealing with things no human being should ever have to, including finding a dead body, discovering her friend may be a murderer… And oh yeah, finding out she has the power to summon a magical bridge which may or may not be slowly killing her. Add in some serious drama at home involving her parents’ separation, and things finally come crashing down on Vic this week, in a big way.

Spoilers for NOS4A2‘s “The Wraith” past this point.

On last week’s “The Gas Mask Man,” we discovered that the otherwise lovable janitor Bing Partridge (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) had not only helped Manx kidnap Vic’s friend Haley, but also murdered her mother. The audience found out some other absolutely horrifying secrets about Bing, but that’s enough to shatter a lot of Vic’s world.

It also help establish a relationship between Manx — who has been searching for Vic — and in this week’s episode, the two finally meet… At a Peter Pan bus line stop, of course. The meeting ends up cut short when Maggie (Jahkara J. Smith) is attacked by Manx’s car, the titular Wraith, and ends up in the hospital. By episode’s end, Maggie is seemingly in a coma, Bing is still running free, and Vic ends up voluntarily committing herself to a mental hospital.

“It’s one of those moments that is just so infused with a million different experiences and thought processes and emotions,” Cummings told Decider over the phone about the episode. “Partly self-sabotage, partly trying to make [her] father feel guilty for what’s going on, partly just to remain close to Maggie.”

That leads to big questions going forward: for example, how is Vic going to take down the murderous Manx if she’s trapped inside a padded room? But first, we talked to Cummings about her first scene with Quinto, what it means to be a Strong Creative (the show’s name for someone with the power to access a magical realm of the mind), and just how difficult it is to film scenes while whipping off a motorcycle helmet:

Decider: Before we get into the episode, I have to ask you… How many times did you have to film yourself taking off a motorcycle helmet over the course of making the show?

Ashleigh Cummings: Oh my God. I’m so glad you asked this question, because it was the bane of my existence during that period of time. I mean, I’m lucky that that’s the bane of my existence, but we had so many issues with that, the helmet and the gloves, because there would be so many scenes where I’d have to launch into action.

We get new directors every couple of episodes, and I’d have to explain to them every time, like, “You want me to launch into action and just storm off in this kind of fury and immensity of feeling and emotion and hop on my bike and go, but what’s actually going to happen is I’m going to start storming off. I’m going to take about five minutes to put this helmet on, and then I’m going to have to put the gloves on, and I’m going to have to do it up. It just takes a really long time, so it’s really going to kill the moment.”

So we had to do a lot of editing around that because I didn’t want to… You know, safety first. I didn’t ever want to go without the helmet or encourage others to do that. So we always got it on, but it was definitely cut around because it was a bit of a downer during the epic moments.

Watching the show, I keep feeling awful for you every single time you have one of those scenes. It’s so much work!

No, it’s so funny! Then trying to create continuity with my hair when that’s happening is also a hilarity in and of itself. So yep, helmets, not film friendly.

To jump into the episode proper, the big thing I want to talk about, of course, is the showdown with Manx, which is something we’ve been building to since the premiere. What I thought was so fascinating, beyond the content of the scene, was your physicality versus Zachary Quinto’s physicality. The way that I saw it, you were very bunched tight in the scene. He’s laying back and relaxed.

So that was the first scene we ever filmed together. We’d had one other scene where we’re on the phone to each other and we kind of read off our lines, but we never actually acted together. So, I mean, I remember we spent a good deal of time working out the layout of the space. Tim [Southam], our director, had a good vision of it but was trying to kind of get into the nitty gritty of it all in terms of, yeah, the physicality, the spacing. We originally had a blocking set out and when we went to try it didn’t feel quite right. I remember trying to keep distance, so we had one chair between us, but I definitely wanted to lean forward. So I’m leaning forward to portray a sense of false power in many ways. Vic’s feeling pretty vulnerable at this point.

One thing I discussed with [showrunner] Jami [O’Brien] early on is that I didn’t want Vic to feel like a hero immediately. What was important to me is that heroes are also portrayed as being terrified, and the courage isn’t that they go in with this emotional fortitude or anything. It’s that they face terrifying situations despite the fear, and the fear still exists. So I still wanted Vic to be terrified anyway.

We also had a lot of discussions about [my] jacket. They initially thought… We thought we wanted me to be zipped up, but I felt like that was my hero silhouette, if you know what I mean. I wanted her vulnerability to still be present, so we ended up having it zipped down, that she wasn’t quite ready to go into battle just yet. So yeah, it was a bunch of things that kind of came into it. I also had extremely dry eyes that day! I don’t know why, but I had the driest eyes, and I could not keep them open for more than a couple of seconds. So I was fighting against that.

It’s interesting to hear you talk about the chairs because that was very much in my mind, in terms of where Vic was going to sit at that point. There’s another row of seats opposite that she could sit down to separate herself, to get herself away from Manx. But it’s a choice that she almost makes twice on the episode. One is with Manx, and before that with Bing. She knows Bing is a murderer. She knows he’s at least abetted in a kidnapping, but she runs up and approaches him in the hall anyway.

That’s the genius of it. She is shaking in her boots, but she is pushing through anyway and facing these challenges head-on. We have spent much of the season seeing her run away from her fears and the things that she doesn’t want to face. We’re at this turning point in her story where it’s time that she starts looking at the things that scare her most right in the eye. So yeah, that’s definitely a huge part of it.

There is one moment during the conversation with Manx which gets interrupted, just when Maggie grabs the door handle of The Wraith… Manx makes her this offer. He says the kids in Christmasland, they don’t have a mother. He’s essentially saying, “I’m going to take you away from it all.” Is there a part of Vic that wants to accept that offer, before she’s interrupted with what’s going on with Maggie?

Vic is just in a whirlwind of emotions and experiences and feelings. I really wanted to play with a lack of simplicity in her journey … The multi-dimensionality of her experience and conflicting emotions and feelings because part of that meeting for me is that there is this spark. There’s a connection. They do recognize something of themselves in the other. There’s this curiosity. For Manx, it’s more of a… Almost a romantic attraction. For Vic, it’s a little different. But for me, when I was experiencing it, I felt myself sort of get swept up in the fact that she’s finally met someone who can kind of match her on this level.

She’s pretty clear cut about her beliefs and morality, so she’s very quick to defend what she believes in, but I definitely think that… I mean, part of Vic’s journey will ultimately be about self-sabotage and self-destruction and so on, and there are little flickers of that all through her story in this season. Whether or not it’s captured, or if they chose to use it in editing, I’m not entirely sure. I just wanted there to be so many options for Vic and so many things going through her mind and so many contradictions. That was a big thing. There are so many feelings that she has that she doesn’t want to feel. She doesn’t want to feel hatred for her father, but that develops and it’s just a very confusing time for her.

One of the big themes I took from this episode was the push and pull between creativity for commerce, and art for arts sake. On one side you have Manx talking about how he figured out a way around the cost of his “art” as a Strong Creative – that’s by selling children on his theme park. Then there’s Vic… She’s destroying herself. She’s bleeding from her eye. But she keeps going anyway.

That was a really important point because, I mean, I’m an artist, and I’ve definitely explored my creativity in different ways, in versions that can be self-destructive and those that can be kind of, I guess, self-constructive or creative. In our society, we have this idea that the constructive version is the good one and the destructive version of our creativity is negative. It’s kind of flipped on our head in this situation. There is no black and white, clear cut answer in this world that we’re exploring, and I love that because Manx is doing to something arguably constructive with it in his mind, but it is at the cost of so many other people. It’s a question, like can we create art? Can we engage our creativity without causing destruction to ourselves? I believe we can. This is obviously a different world. Different metaphors can be read into it.

Vic has this incredible gift that she has opens up doors, or literal bridges. It lets her be her fullest self in some ways, but it takes part of herself in other ways. So it’s real catch-22 of it being two things at once in this moment.

That’s very much encapsulated in the scene where Vic stays up all night painting before her confrontation with Manx, which is just a flurry of activity. She’s creating this art, but it’s coming out of her nightmares. And then it has that gut punch at the end where it all gets thrown out. I know obviously you didn’t create the woodcuts by yourself, but what was it like filming those scenes?

It was great. I think I did have music playing in my ears for some of it, but honestly we kind of filmed… We filmed that a little bit improvisation-ally of sorts. The director would scream out different… Not scream, he wasn’t a screamer as such, but he would yell out different ideas for the cameramen to zoom in at this point or pan around or what not. So we had a dance to it. We figured out a basic choreography within that room and just got a bunch of different shots. And it was at the end of the night and it was all happening very fast, but it was really fun.

I know that feeling when there’s just so much bubbling out of you and you get lost in it. It’s a bit of a terrifying sequence now that I look back on it. And we have this incredible young woman who did all the prints… She came in and did some of the actual handwork because I… Try as I might, I’m not an artist by any means and I found it quite challenging. So she came in and fixed up in the finer details.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have the party scene that Vic and Maggie go to, which is such a fun, relatively light surprise between the darkness in the last episode, and the Manx meeting later on. Was it a relief to film that sequence?

It honestly did sort of feel like a party, and I felt extremely out of place because I was always the awkward kid that… I mean, I rarely went to parties. I rarely do. I’m just not made for this day and age, I don’t think. It overwhelms me and I’m always the awkward guy in the corner. So I felt similarly, like I didn’t really know how to converse with my peers around me. They were talking about popular culture, which I had no concept of and couldn’t engage with. So it was kind of funny, and Jahkara [J. Smith] and I are fairly similar in that sense, so we kind of clung to each other. But it was actually… It was really fun.

[The director] had this huge microphone and he was instructing everyone with his big, booming voice. Everyone was so wonderful, honestly. All the extras and everything were on top of it and dancing to no music. So it was really… it was a nice relief in that a lot of the crew members came up to me and they’re like, “Whoa, I didn’t realize you could smile.” Because Vic just doesn’t get to have that opportunity much in the show, and they’re like, “It’s so nice to see you having a good time.” I didn’t always have to be in the dark spaces of imagination.

There’s that one monologue that I did versions of, ones that were darker and ones that were lighter. They ended up going for the lighter option, I think, in the final cut just to give some breath because it was hard for people just to stay down where Vic is, you know? We’re lucky with cinema that we can escape it and craft the storyline around it, but some people don’t get the opportunity. But then the other aspect of it is that sometimes we are in our darkest places, and we have moments of light. So this is just a young girl who’s trying go through teenage-hood, and it was really important that we paralleled that experience with all the deeper, darker realities and metaphors that were spiraling around her.

There’s one moment in particular where Maggie is on the couch and Vic and Drew start dancing in the background. It just made me laugh out loud because suddenly Vic is having fun and a good time in the midst of all this seriousness. How much goofy dancing did you guys have to do to get that shot?

Here’s a little story. Rarmian [Newton], who plays Drew, was my first ever childhood crush other than Elton John. He was my first “my age” crush. I saw him in Billy Elliot. Well, honestly, I had a crush on all the boys who played Billy Elliot, the musical. This is when we must have been like 12 or 13 or something. I met him once on the train station in Melbourne and kind of fumbled my way through being like, “Did you play Billy Elliot? I’m a really big fan.” He is actually good friends with my boyfriend now.

So Rarmian and I sort of had this… We’ve known each other for a while, and he is an amazing dancer. I trained in dancing for years, and we were determined to do the world’s worst dancing in that scene and just to go for it. We were so excited about it and we did the first take and we were promptly instructed to tone it down, which we did by maybe one percent. So none of the shots of us actually dancing… because we spent a good amount of time with the cinematographer filming close-ups around us, and we pulled out some great moves. I’m so disappointed because I don’t know where that footage is,  and I really want it for my reel! We did so much goofy dancing. Unfortunately, none of it made it to screen except for little glimpse, which I’m glad you caught.

This is also a big episode in terms of Vic’s relationship with Maggie… What do you think their relationship is right now, halfway through the season? Is it like an Obi-Wan/Luke type thing? Is it a friendship? Is it some combination there, or something else?

Vic has been resistant to the relationship with Maggie because it would mean accepting the responsibility that has been placed in front of her. It would mean facing demons that she’d rather not look at, truth and realities that she would rather push aside. But when Haley [Darby Camp] is abducted and Sharon is murdered, Vic has no other choice but to look at these things which are literally holding her by the shoulders and staring her down. She understands that Maggie is her ally and, in fact, one of the… probably the only person other than maybe Manx who really understands what’s going on, but she aligns with Maggie obviously on a moral spectrum.

It’s really the beginning. It’s the burgeoning of their alliance. It’s the sparking, the ignition of a friendship, and there are so many different layers to which that can occur. They can be romantic undertones if you choose to look at it that way. It was something that we chose to keep a little bit ambiguous because at the heart of it, no matter what form that relationship took, it was just about these two hearts that cared deeply, good humans with great moral compasses that have suffered familial trauma and understand each other in a way that no one else really does and has to go on this journey together.

It’s quite extraordinary to see two young women take on this figure of the patriarchy, of the misogyny, if you will, and just to see young women fighting and all of these adults failing them. The rejection that occurs at the end of that episode by my dad, and not being believed and being accused of being insane, not being supported and abandoned. We see that happen a lot in awful circumstances, the whole #MeToo movement. All of this stuff is really prevalent and just to see that depicted in this fantastical environment is really exciting to me.

I did want to ask you about that final moment you mentioned where she makes the decision to voluntarily commit herself. Why do you think she does that? Why do you think she does essentially gives up at that point?

It’s one of those moments that is just so infused with a million different experiences and thought processes and emotions. I think partly self-sabotage, partly trying to make [her] father feel guilty for what’s going on, partly just to remain close to Maggie. I think that was a bigger one, that they were in the same hospital and she could be close by. She feels a sense of responsibility. There’s also, I think, a slight fear of Vic’s own sanity… not being 100% solid. Also, just literally having nowhere else to go, there is no other option. She has been betrayed by the man that she revered the most and abandoned by her parents. She’s completely lost and alone in the world, so she’s … gravitating towards the one person who has her back, who is Maggie. It’s a very confusing moment, but she doesn’t see much other choice.

Before I let you go, for those who haven’t read the book or watched ahead on AMC Premiere, what can you tease about Vic in the rest of the season?

Well, the journey takes a couple of different roads simultaneously, if that makes sense. It’s her journey towards accepting and stepping up to the plate as the woman who will… You know, these forces will come to a head at one point. Towards the end of the season, there will be a real showdown. This was a tiny little glimmer of what will occur in episode 9 and 10, which all get pretty exciting and terrifying.

But Vic also goes down a pretty destructive route as well. In this episode, we see her take her first drink, and if you’ve read the book, you know that Vic’s journey with substances is not a healthy one. So we see that beginning to flourish. A few more bats escape the bridge in some ways, and it’s her just really trying to reconcile herself with the situation she’s been placed in, find her way through the familial environment that she is so confused about at this point, and… Yeah, we’ll spend some time with her in the hospital and see where it goes from there. There are a lot of twists and turns, so stay tuned.

NOS4A2 airs on AMC on Sundays at 10/9c, and is currently streaming on AMC Premiere.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Where to stream NOS4A2