Kate Siegel plays the woman who has already decided not to like you, and in Mike Flanagan's horror she does it well enough that we miss her when the camera moves on. What she looks like anywhere else is still an open question.
Fi1m perspective
Theodora Crain in The Haunting of Hill House (2018) keeps her gloves on. Siegel plays her gloved to the wrist and sharp with everyone, the sibling who would rather be rude than be touched, and it is the kind of part she has made her own: the woman in a horror story who is not screaming but being difficult. We liked her Theo a good deal, because she plays a frightened woman as an irritable one, and irritability is harder to fake than fear. In a series that gives its grown-up cast uneven material, she and Victoria Pedretti were the two who made us believe these adults had once been small in that house.
The career before that was small film roles and television guest spots from 2007, then a horror part in Mike Flanagan's Oculus (2013). The turn came with Hush (2016), a lead she co-wrote with Flanagan, and it is still the film people name first when they name her. Since then she has worked with him again and again: Ouija: Origin of Evil, Gerald's Game (2017), and the run of series that followed Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020), Midnight Mass (2021), in which she took the lead as Erin Greene, and The Fall of the House of Usher (2023). Eight projects with one director is a lot, and it is fair to wonder what she would be like under another one.
What works is the prickliness. She is repeatedly cast as sarcastic, guarded women, and she plays them without asking us to like them, which in a genre that usually wants its cast sympathetic and then eaten is unusual and welcome. What is said about Hush, that the performance is physically and emotionally committed, matches what we have seen of her elsewhere. What does not always work is the sameness of the brief. When one director writes most of your parts, the parts tend to share a temperament, and an actor this good at being cold has not often been asked to be anything else.
She has now gone behind the camera, with a segment of V/H/S/Beyond (2024). Of her approach she has said: "I approach my storytelling from an emotional point of view as opposed to a technical point of view." That is a fair description of her acting too. The thing worth watching for is whether, given the choice of who to put in front of the lens, she writes herself somebody kind.
Biography
Kate Siegel is an American actress and screenwriter. Born Kate Gordon Siegelbaum on 9 August 1982 in Silver Spring, Maryland, she graduated from Syracuse University with a BFA in acting in 2004. She made her film debut in The Curse of the Black Dahlia (2007) and her television debut in Ghost Whisperer (2009).
Siegel is known for her frequent collaborations with director Mike Flanagan, to whom she is married. She starred in his films Oculus (2013), Hush (2016, which she co-wrote), Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016) and Gerald's Game (2017). On television she has played Theodora Crain in The Haunting of Hill House (2018), Erin Greene in Midnight Mass (2021) and Camille L'Espanaye in The Fall of the House of Usher (2023).
