‘Carrie’ Star Samantha Sloyan Finds Love Inside Horror’s Most Nefarious Mother

KUALA LUMPUR, 12 OCTOBER 2026 —

[Warning: This story contains spoilers for Prime Video ‘s Carrie series.] Samantha Sloyan is aware of the distaste for some of her past characters.

I hate you so much.’ But they had that reaction because it reminded them of something so personal, like a person,” she tells The Hollywood Reporter. “There’s an intimacy to that hate that I’ve found really meaningful. I’d love to know that people reacted strongly. Especially when it’s character-based.

It’s harder to manage when they’re just like, ‘No, it’s your face, I hate your face,’ and you’re like, ‘Oh, OK.’ But when it’s about a character you played, I’m just so thrilled that they believed in that person.” Related Stories TV 'Blade Runner 2099' Drops New Trailer, Team Teases a Detective Story Set When Replicants Take Over TV Nicolas Cage Teases 'True Detective' Role, Says He "Probably" Won't Work With Prime Video Again After Refusing to Sign AI Waiver for 'Spider-Noir' Series creator Mike Flanagan says her understanding and love for her characters is Sloyan’s gift.

“Sam has this incredible gift for committing fully to the perspective of the character that she’s playing,” he tells THR . “Even if Sam’s playing what we would look at as a villain, Sam is never playing a villain. She’s so committed to their point of view that she finds an enormous amount of sympathy, even for characters who I thought were irredeemable, like Bev Keane in Midnight Mass.

I was like, ‘You’re playing this just loathsome character,’ and Sam would go, ‘Oh yeah, to you . But to her, she’s the hero of the story. And I was like, ‘God, that’s brilliant.’” Sloyan also took heat from fans in 2015, when she joined Grey’s Anatomy in Season 11 as Dr. Penelope “Penny” Blake, a doctor caught up in the death of Patrick Dempsey’s beloved Derek “McDreamy” Shepherd.

She still laughs as she defends her character: “They didn’t give him the proper tests!” Now Sloyan is taking on one of horror’s most infamous matriarchs: Margaret White in Carrie , Flanagan’s TV reimagining of Stephen King’s classic novel, which premiered Wednesday on Prime Video. Previous screen versions of Margaret include Julianne Moore, Patricia Clarkson and Piper Laurie, who earned an Oscar nomination for the 1976 film, in which Sissy Spacek starred as Carrie.

Summer H. Howell portrays the titular character in the Prime Video series. But the new series offers an “entirely different” Margaret, one who, Sloyan says, “loves her daughter.” In Flanagan‘s take, Margaret is fiercely committed to shielding Carrie from the world’s dangers and from her classmates’ cruelty, even becoming a parental advocate in their community and on social media.

“It’s a declaration of war, really, for her,” Sloyan says of Margaret going public about her daughter’s bullying. “I think the only thing that would bring Margaret to that point is protecting her daughter.

And then, of course, she gets charmed by the insidious nature of it all.” Carrie is Sloyan’s latest collaboration with Flanagan, who also directed her in The Fall of the House of Usher , The Midnight Club and The Haunting of Hill House . She also has a small role in his upcoming Exorcist film. The writer-director, Sloyan says, has become a creative home.

“In a particular industry where things can feel very nomadic, you’re meeting new people all the time and there’s no real security … to have somewhere that feels familiar, I count myself among the luckiest,” she says. Flanagan says Sloyan was his only choice for Margaret.

“What I love about Samantha is that she’s able to communicate strength and an aching vulnerability at the same time better than any other actor I’ve ever worked with,” he says.

“Margaret is utterly formidable, but there’s this whole other story going on behind her eyes … If we’re doing Margaret White not as a monster, but as a fiercely protective, fiercely loving mother, whose tools are incorrect and whose perspective is limited, and who can look as much like she’s trapped in this situation as she is kind of the jailer, there’s no one better to play it.” In a conversation with THR , Sloyan dissects playing Margaret, the character’s dark path, surprise reveal, her demise and her pitch for a Margaret prequel.

Given Carrie has been adapted before, we’ve seen iterations of the Margaret White character. Going into the series, who was Margaret to you, and why did you feel she was someone you wanted to take on? When Mike [Flanagan] talked to me about Carrie , in my mind I’m thinking of the book.

I think the quote is something like she’s “a snarling, foaming beast” coming after Carrie when we are introduced to her, and of course the same for the Piper Laurie portrayal. The relationship built in that piece, she views Carrie as basically a personification of sin in a lot of ways.

So when Mike talked to me about it, the first images that hit my mind, I was like, “Wow, I don’t know what that’s going to be like.” And then he was like, “No. The reason to do Carrie again, because it’s been done so beautifully, is to come at it from a different way.” So he brought it all down to the foundation, and he built it back up.

And the way he built Margaret was: Margaret loves her daughter. And that to me that was something entirely different. You also see it reflected in our Carrie, this young, open, intelligent, curious woman who has been traumatized, but is almost quite aware of it. Mike talks about the original Carrie as a vibrating trauma, in a way, and that is not who we have.

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