Zach Gilford’s face is one of the first things you see in the new Netflix series Midnight Mass, and it immediately sets the tone for the ensuing seven hours. He’s lost, wayward, and wounded, yet undeniably soulful, just as he was in his breakout role as the tender, artsy Matt Saracen on Friday Night Lights and in the underrated horror flick The Last Winter.
The new series from The Haunting of Hill House mastermind MIke Flanagan sees Gilford’s Riley Flynn returning to a provincial, devoutly Christian fishing island (the exact location is never stated, but it’s strongly New England-coded). A new priest arrives and tensions begin to boil over between the townspeople, creating some serious drama before the supernatural elements even manifest.
“I auditioned for the show only getting to see two scenes,” Gilford says. “All I knew was who my character was, what Mike had done before, and that I was a big fan of his. He does the horror genre in a different way. “
The cast had done only a single table read when production stopped in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. When it resumed in August, Gilford was suddenly isolated in Vancouver, missing his family and not being able to attend the birth of his son. That somberness comes through in his performance as Riley, who is the closest thing we have to an audience avatar.
“[My wife] told me, ‘I knew it was bad.’ I wouldn’t even fold my laundry, I would just wash it and throw it on the floor,” he recalls. “I’m so OCD, I do all the laundry in our house, I have folding boards so it looks like Abercrombie & Fitch, and I was just like, ‘Who cares, just put it over there. I’ll just survive off the floor.’”
Difficult circumstances aside, it’s one of the 39-year-old actor’s best performances ever. Though guarded and soft spoken, he forms moving connections with characters like Kate Siegel’s Erin Greene and Hamish Linklater’s Father Paul, as Flanagan sets Crockett Island up like an intricate domino sculpture before tipping things into abject chaos. Between Midnight Mass and his upcoming work with Flanagan on The Midnight Club, Gilford should be strongly considered for a spot in the top 10 of any post-Friday Night Lights cast rankings.
With the new series earning rave reviews, GQ spoke to Gilford about what he thinks makes horror special, how halting for COVID-19 affected the show (for better and worse), and bringing Mike Flanagan’s eerie vision to life. Spoilers for Netflix’s Midnight Mass to follow.
I know you’ve talked a lot in the press about what happens to Riley’s character, but it still caught me off guard.
I think it’s cool. I auditioned for the show only getting to see two scenes. All I knew was who my character was, what Mike had done before, and that I was a big fan of his. He does the horror genre in a different way. The word “horror” is such a large umbrella and when we say it people are like, “I don’t like that,” but it’s not gory. It’s not even scary, it’s just a little creepy, maybe.
It’s almost gothic.
That’s a perfect word for it. And I love that kind of stuff where it just makes you feel uncomfortable while you’re watching it, but his cinematography is beautiful and his storytelling and the characters he develops [are terrific]. So all I had was these two scenes, and for an audition they were amazing scenes. I knew, holy shit, I want to do this. And I don’t even know what this show is about. [laughs] All I knew was the logline of “A young priest arrives in a small island fishing town and strange things start happening.”
I knew I was gonna die at some point, because I was only in six out of seven episodes, but I had no idea how or when. I get to the end of episode four and I’m like, “Aw fuck, I’m dead in four?” And then I come back and five is this super heavy episode. Even on the page when I burn up in the boat, it says, “We pull out on Erin screaming. Nothing but her screams, even over the credits.” And that was so haunting. Getting to watch the episode was even more haunting than I thought it would be. [laughs]
You’ve appeared in a lot of horror over the years, including The Purge: Anarchy and now Midnight Mass. What attracts you to the genre, and why do you think it’s good for these sorts of allegorical stories?
I think what’s kinda cool about it is that you can take the yucky parts of us and really magnify them. You can put them in an extreme and give it some sort of metaphor or symbolism around what’s really going on. The fact that I’ve been in several of them is completely coincidental, it’s not even that I’m a horror person, and I want to do a bunch of it.
But my first movie ever was The Last Winter. It was so cool, because it was like, we’re in Iceland drilling for oil and there’s these weird things that start happening and then we talk about how oil is corpses rotting in the ground, animals, dinosaurs or whatever. It kinda comes out that these ghosts are haunting us. There’s like a weird moose ghost. It sounds corny when I’m saying it, but it’s kind of a cool thought that we’re just graverobbers of ancient, prehistoric animals. That’s one way to put it into a creepy movie and make commentary on what we’re doing in the arctic when we’re drilling for oil.
With Midnight Mass, it gives you all different angles and viewpoints on religion. People who very earnestly believe in it. Some people are very openly skeptical–not just skeptical but disdainful of it. And then people like Bev [Keane] who proselytize it and believe anyone who doesn’t agree with them is going to hell. You get to know all these characters so well and they’re so human and you kinda feel for all of them and their plight in life and where they’re coming from. It allows you to, no matter what your beliefs are, accept these other people and their beliefs.
I feel similarly, whatever my personal beliefs are about those things, my philosophy in life is, “You do you. You believe whatever you want and if it helps you experience life to the fullest, good for you. But don’t try to make me believe it, and I won’t try to make you believe what I believe and then we can all be cool.”
I think the show does a really good job of artfully unpacking what is each person’s core trauma. There’s a lot of dimensionality that really pays off, especially in a show that’s dialogue-heavy and relies on characters expressing themselves through speech.
[laughs] It’s interesting, because I know a big thing in writing is: Don’t Say It, Show It. I think Mike finds a really good refrain in saying it more than showing it. It’s not like the show is full of exposition dumps.
Even the death monologue I have, and Kate has one as well, the beginning of that scene is her saying “What happens when you die?” and me saying “I don’t know. And anyone that says they do is lying, they’re full of shit.” And then she’s like, “Just tell me. Comfort me right now and tell me what you think. What do you personally think happens?” And in that case, someone who had just lost their pregnancy asks, “Would you please just do this for me?” I’ll say, “Okay, I’ll wax philosophical about death for you because it’s what you fucking want right now. And I’ll be honest about it.” Whereas, if you now in this interview said, “What do you think happens when you die?” I would just say, “I don’t fucking know. You’re dead, you’re gone.” I wouldn’t be able to get into it.
Especially in the early goings of the show, we’re kind of seeing things through Riley’s eyes. How did having that responsibility of being the audience conduit affect the way that you built the character?
My approach to pretty much everything I do is you’ve just gotta use what’s on the page and do that scene. If it’s not on the page, it’s not gonna be on the screen and if it’s not on the screen, it never happened. [laughs] Other people do it differently. Kate and I would joke with each other, because every piece of wardrobe she was wearing, she had a story for how her character came upon it. And she’d be like, “Zach, so where did Riley get this jacket?” [And I’d say,] “Wardrobe. I’m wearing a jacket. It’s cold.”
Without making a huge backstory of where I got my jacket, I was always like, “I know I’m coming from my AA meeting on the mainland. I’m coming from my parents’ house.” There was always a feeling that you knew where you were coming [from] and you knew where you were going.
It’s a very methodical show, and there are certain things, like Hamish’s performance, that didn’t click for me until a few episodes in.
I tell people all the time, and I hate saying this, but the show is a slow burn. It’s more of a seven-hour movie than a seven-episode series. It’s not like every episode something happens and it’s a little bit resolved and then it’s a cliffhanger. The story keeps building and building and building.
With Hamish, there was one thing he told me, which I thought was so cool. He talked to a priest in order to get some insight into being a priest. He had said to him, “You know, when you’re up there doing these monologues and your sermons, you’ve gotta remember that you’ve gotta do it like you’re actually holding a service and not just giving a speech–because there might be a lighting guy who’s listening and it really resonates with him. You need to hold the space like you’re actually doing a sermon.” Being in that room, that’s pretty hard to pull off, but I think Hamish pulled that off amazingly.
And then he had me and Henry [Thomas] and Kristen [Lehman] being assholes, giggling in the pews. I’ll never forget there was one take where he did the whole thing and then said, “And the Flynns are having the time of their lives!” [laughs]
At some point you can only hear so much fire and brimstone before it makes you chuckle a little.
Hamish is actually the one person in all of this that I was pretty good friends with before we even did the show. I had never worked with him, I’d just known him and our kids are the same age, we live a few blocks away from each other. So over the past couple years, we’ve gotten to know each other very well and appreciate each other, so it was really cool to get to do those AA scenes and stuff, because I’ve always really admired him as an actor and I enjoy him as a person. I knew I needed to bring my A-game, because I knew Hamish well and I don’t wanna be out-acted by him. But also he’s my friend, so I want to be there for him as his scene partner.
Your character comes in the show and he’s so reluctant to even set foot in the church, so it’s really devastating when he finally has built up this relationship with Father Paul and he gets betrayed.
I’ll never forget, when Father Paul was like, “Come on, you know [who I am].” And then the point where he loses his shit on me–what’s so cool about that is clearly him getting mad at me is a result of my not believing him, which is causing a crack in his beliefs. Because if I haven’t come around after seeing the quote-unquote angel and coming back to life, I think it causes a bit of doubt in him and the only thing that can bring him to rage is if he’s not actually right about all the things he’s been doing.
Production on Midnight Mass was halted by COVID. Do you think that the overall state of the world while you were making the show affected the final product?
I think the way it really colored it was that we had two weeks of prep and then a table read where we did all seven episodes in a row, eight hours of just sitting at a table. That was Friday the 12th of March, 2020. We all went out to dinner that night and on Saturday we were like, “The world is about to shut down. I don’t think this production is gonna go, let’s get home.” So we said, “Oh, it’s gonna be two weeks. It’s gonna be a month. It’s gonna be six weeks.”
We kept in touch throughout. We realized that it was really gonna happen, we were all there shooting the show, and then you realize “Oh my god, we’re still in the middle of fucking COVID.” We get to shoot the show that we believe in, and our protocols on set were so strict that I felt safer at work than I did anywhere else. And on top of that, I’m getting tested two or three times a week, so we can have a bigger bubble than normal. And we all get along really well, so it was just like this special project.
The long and the short of it is that our relationships were much deeper with each other and we knew each other much better than if we had just started shooting on March 16th off the table read and that dinner. We had been communicating with one another, and the better people know each other, it’s gonna work better. Then you add in that it’s a show about a town where the people had known each other their whole lives, I think that’s the biggest way in which it colored it.
The scariness of the world and all that, I don’t know, maybe for some people, but not as much for me. The thing I can speak to for myself is that I had to miss the birth of my son to shoot this show and I didn’t get to meet him until he was six weeks old because of quarantine in Canada. I kind of was alone in Canada for two-and-a-half months without my family. I just felt like a piece of shit. [laughs] I’m playing this character who felt like he was pretty worthless and I was like, “I know what that feels like.”
I can see how that helped you get into a pretty dark headspace for Riley.
My favorite story, I didn’t even recognize this, but when my family finally came up and my wife got to meet the cast and people, Sam Sloyan was like, “Yeah, he was not happy. He never left the house. People would call him and say, ‘Hey, do you wanna come get dinner?’ And he would say, ‘No, I’m fine.’” [My wife] told me, “I knew it was bad.” I wouldn’t even fold my laundry, I would just wash it and throw it on the floor. I’m so OCD, I do all the laundry in our house, I have folding boards so it looks like Abercrombie & Fitch, and I was just like, “Who cares? Just put it over there. I’ll just survive off the floor.”
The last thing I wanted to ask you about was that I know 10 years ago you were the love interest in the “Ours” video with Taylor Swift. Even though that was a decade ago, are there still ripples of that in your life?
I’m so absent on social media, that every now and then I’ll see something where I’m mentioned… But I got the call, and I said of course. We met, she was super sweet, super nice. I’ll never forget, I was only in Nashville for a day and my wife was with me and she left a note in my trailer that was like “Things to do in Nashville if you only have one day,” handwritten.
But then, I’m doing Midnight Club and most of the actors are 19-21 and I don’t think any of them have seen FNL, because they were like five. They see me as the old man on set, which I am, and one of them started asking me about celebrity stories. I don’t really talk about stuff a lot, but I had some random story about P. Diddy. I met him one time in an elevator and he recognized me and said, “You’re a good actor, dude.” And I said thanks. And then I got off the elevator and I was like, “Holy shit. Puffy just recognized me?” [laughs] And they thought that was cool.”
They asked if I had any other stories and I couldn’t even remember, but it wasn’t until we were in the middle of shooting a scene hours later that I wondered what they would think if I told them I was in a Taylor Swift video. Would they think I’m so cool or so lame? I don’t even know what the zeitgeist is right now.