‘Run’ Stars Sarah Paulson And Kiera Allen Give Us Their Perspective On Their New Movie’s “Twisted” Ending

While many psychological thrillers tend to follow a similar trajectory, viewers of the new Hulu original movie Run will be pleased to find a twist on the somewhat tired and occasionally all too predictable genre. Starring Emmy-winning actress Sarah Paulson and newcomer Kiera Allen, Run focuses on the complex mother-daughter relationship between Diane (Paulson) and Chloe (Allen) and the twisted path a mother’s desperation to hold onto her only child can take.

Chloe is a whip-smart University of Washington hopeful who’s ready to leave the nest while Diane appears, at least on the surface, to be a dedicated single mother who brought up her daughter with complete love and care. The audience is initially led to believe that because of Chloe’s myriad health issues — she nearly died at birth and now has asthma and uses a wheelchair, among other things — Diane’s overprotectiveness is simply concern for her daughter’s well-being and a desire to ensure she’s well-cared for in the way only a parent can guarantee.

Of course, director Aneesh Chaganty (Searching), who co-wrote the script with Sev Ohanian, chose the title of the movie for a reason, and the more Chloe discovers about her mother and about herself, the more desperate she is to get away. Unfortunately, that isn’t quite so easy since as far as Diane has gone to care for her daughter, she’s gone even further to put measures in place to keep the teen tethered to her side. What follows is a nail-biting, intense journey of the legacy of trauma, self-discovery, and ultimately, of fighting back.

Decider had the opportunity to talk to Paulson and Allen about their approach to the underlying trauma of Run, how the actresses managed to switch off after shooting such intense scenes, and what they both think of that ending.

(NOTE: This interview contains spoilers for Run, including discussion of the final scene.)

DECIDER: Run was one of those movies that had you screaming at the screen a lot. I couldn’t help but notice that despite the movie’s underlying trauma, there was almost a sense of camp to it. I know Aneesh Chagnaty mentioned that he wanted to bring out a more classical thriller in the vein of Rear Window and Misery, but did you get that sense of camp from the script?

SARAH PAULSON: I saw someone else say something about this and I’m not entirely sure I understand it, but then again, I haven’t seen the movie, so I might understand it better if I had. As far as I know, I don’t think that was Aneesh’s goal, but I could be wrong about that. I mean, he’s a really brilliant guy so part and parcel with the classic component he was going for comes some of that for sure, but I don’t know! I certainly wasn’t intending to be campy.

KIERA ALLEN: That’s an interesting take. I think Aneesh drew on a lot of classic film traditions. He’s such a film buff and so educated on films. We would be on set and he would be pulling film titles out of the air as inspirations that I’d never even heard of. I thought I knew a fair amount about film, but he’s on another level, so I can’t even speak to you about what’s going on in his brain. He’s so smart and brilliant and pulling from so many places. I know Sarah and I always took it very seriously and took our characters very seriously and wanted to bring them to life in the truest way possible. When we were on set, doing those scenes together, it was real, let me tell you! If you are two inches away from Sarah Paulson’s face and you are watching that performance, it’s real.

There’s no denying that trauma was definitely at the heart of both Diane and Chloe separately as well as their relationship together. How did you, as actors, sort of delve into that dark place to bring these characters to life?

KA: I had a lot of conversations with Anesh about trauma and did a lot of research. I read a lot of stories that were similar to Chloe’s and heard stories of the people around them and how they changed [after those experiences]. Trauma is such an individual thing, so I can’t speak to what anyone else would be like going through this, but we crafted what this would be like for Chloe. [In preparation for that final scene], I wrote a whole bio of what those years [in between] would have been like for her, what she was able to overcome and what she still struggles with and what she still needs to work on and what’s always going to be with her because you can’t undo that. She’s come to a place where she’s happy and she has a wonderful life and she has this independence and she has everything she has ever wanted. [But] can’t make that unhappen. There are certain parts of it that will always be a part of her and figuring out where those things are, and how they get set off and how she fights through them was a big part of setting up for that scene.

And Sarah, how did you get to that point in yourself where you could play someone like Diane?

SP: I think it was all in the script for me really. Aneesh talked a lot about what happened to Diane as a child. It’s a widely understood idea, psychologically, that when you have been abused and when you have been broken, you tend to break others. I think for Diane, the thing that was interesting to me about it was all she wanted to do was do something better than what was done for her, and how twisted in her mind about how her entire life became about this child. In trying to right some emotional wrong, she then ended up becoming a person that was so unhinged because Chloe became the absolute anchor in her life and gave her stability and a purpose. The moment she was going to fly the nest, Diane was not going to know where she was in space and time and the idea of losing her was literally [like choosing] between breathing and not breathing. It wasn’t possible for her to do that. She probably desperately needed to feel needed and wanted and chosen because that’s what she didn’t feel as a child. She wanted a daughter who needed her, who couldn’t function without her, and she needed to believe that that was so, so she did things that encouraged that thinking in her child.

It’s an interesting perspective on Diane, which brings me to my next question. Sarah, you seem to have a penchant, for lack of a better term, for bringing out the sympathetic qualities in characters that might otherwise be seen as villains or at the very least unlikable. Is that a conscious choice or something that happens naturally, maybe because you’re someone who looks for the best in people in your own life?

SP: Oh, I don’t think I’m that way as a person (laughs). I think I can be a little bit cynical actually, which is interesting that you say that because I hadn’t really thought of it as to the why. I have been asked this question before and I think some of it probably comes from the Marcia Clarke thing. I think that is more suggestive of what we as a collective as people had chosen to believe about Marcia Clarke and what we all decided she was and what she was about and she must have been x, y, and z in order to behave in these ways. I think it speaks to our personal attachment as citizens as to how we chose to hold her erroneously, so it’s less about how I made you sympathize with her, but more about how I reminded you that she was a person, she was a human being. So then all of a sudden, you’re confronted with your own previously held beliefs that then you start to break away and then you think it’s me doing something but in fact all I was doing was trying to play a three dimensional person.

It seems like I have this penchant for [these characters], or an ability to [play them], but I think it actually is more about a collective decision that was made. I think the thing about that show that was so powerful is that it insisted that everyone confront their own beliefs about the person, so I get credit for something that actually has to do with trying to be truthful about the experience as I understood it.

I don’t know if that’s a skill of mine or a penchant, but I do know that I am interested in playing people where nobility is not the guiding principle by which they live their lives, because I do think so much that with leading ladies, or leading men, there always needs to be some element of heroism involved in their character in order for us to love them and get behind them, and I’m not interested in that so much as an actor. It’s not that I don’t like watching it or rooting for them when I’m watching those kind of movies, but I’m interested more in the subterranean story that drives human behavior and sometimes that part of us that does something that is totally venal and totally not corrupt but self-serving. You know, that kind of stuff we do sometimes ends up functioning from that place from time to time, like it or not, and I’m interested in that as an actor.

Well, I imagine that’s more interesting to play as well since it’s certainly more interesting to watch from an audience perspective.

SP: I think it’s because you recognize it! You recognize yourself when somebody does something that is slightly questionable [because you think], ‘I might have done that too.’ Not necessarily in this dynamic (laughs), but in general, I think when you see human behavior that you see in yourself, it helps you feel less alone and less self-hating about some of the things you may or may not have done in your life that you regret or don’t regret. You see what I’m saying?

Most definitely. With such intense scenes, how were the two of you able to kind of step away from that toxicity once the camera stopped rolling? It must have been difficult to separate yourself from those characters when they yelled “cut.”

KA: Yeah, it was intense (laughs). It wasn’t always easy to do a really intense scene and then think, oh, what’s for lunch? But I think we got so much closer doing those scenes. I might even get emotional talking about this because I remember shooting some really really difficult scenes but the love was still there. Even if the characters were fighting or battling in some way, all that intensity went into the love, care, and support we had for each other. It just got rechannelled into the ways [Sarah] was there for me and supported me and helped me through those intense scenes. I’ve never done anything like that before! This is my first movie, and her having all this experience and such a kind heart really made a huge difference to my experience on set.

SP: I think for me, you can’t look at Kiera’s face knowing that you are putting her through all this trauma and causing her all this pain [and not feel something]. My affection for Kiera and my respect for her was enormous and so it was challenging but it was my job. I thought, if I don’t go there fully, then Chloe’s story doesn’t have the same impact in terms of what the ultimate end of that story is. I gotta go there in order to have her arc be fully realized, and it was hard because she’s the most open, lovely, smart, witty, wonderful woman. But again, that’s the job! At the end of the day, it’s our job to bring Aneesh’s vision to fruition, we both wanted that for him. He was so dedicated to making this movie and was so passionate about it and had taken such care and time with every little nook and cranny of it that we both felt in an unspoken way that we wanted to give him what he wanted it to have. That required us both to dig in and do what needed to be done.

Let’s talk about that final scene for a moment. There is a bit of ambiguity there. We know Chloe seems to have moved on and has a successful, happy life, but I’m wondering your take on things. Did Diane ever fully realize what she’d done and that she was in the wrong? Did Chloe really go there intending to kill Diane and did she maybe inherit some of her mother’s more villainous qualities?

SP: I don’t know how much cognitive function Diane had (laughs), but I do think as long as [Chloe] is still coming to see her, that’s all that matters to her.

KA: Oh, so twisted! This final scene is something that Aneesh and I put a lot of work into behind the scenes. I think for most of this process, I didn’t really talk to Sarah about where her character was coming from because I kind of wanted that to be totally opaque to me. So much of what this character is going through is, oh my God, why is my mom doing this to me? What is wrong with my mom? And if I had heard these beautiful explanations I’m now hearing from Sarah about where Diane was coming from, I think it would have been harder to get into Chloe’s mind. So I was coming into it purely from Chloe’s perspective and not knowing at all what Diane was thinking.

I don’t see it as her going to kill her mother at the end, I see it as her doing what her mother’s done to her for so many years. She’s keeping her sick, she’s keeping her as non-threatening. This is coming from a place of her having been traumatized by this person. She wants to have a relationship with her mother and she’s rationalized it to herself as this being the only way she can feel safe around her mother. The only way she can give them both what they need is to incapacitate her, to make her not a danger anymore.

In terms of the cycle of abuse, if Chloe turns this off instead of keeping it going down the generations then she can keep her children safe. She can de-compartmentalize all her trauma and everything she’s been through into this one relationship in her life. And who couldn’t argue that Diane doesn’t deserve it? I think that’s where the character is coming from and I believe that’s how she’s justified it to herself.

Jennifer Still is a writer and editor from New York who cares too way much about fictional characters and spends her time writing about them.

Watch Run (2020) on Hulu