Andrew Lincoln has claimed that his episode of Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities is "the scariest" hour of television Netflix has ever made. The Walking Dead star appears in The Murmuring, the final installment of the Oscar-winning filmmaker's horror anthology.
Also starring Essie Davis, the chapter is directed by The Babadook's Jennifer Kent and sees Lincoln play Edgar Bradley, an ornithology professor who buries himself in his study of birds following the death of his daughter. As expected from a show such as this, spooky goings-on ensue.
"I hope audiences will have the same reaction I did when I read it, that it was a beautiful story about loss and coming to terms with grief," the actor told Tudum recently, ahead of the episode's premiere. "Hopefully some way of finding a way to navigate grief? But also, equally, that they get the scariest, the most appalling, nerve-shredding hour that Netflix has created. So far."
When talking about how he got involved in the project, Lincoln described himself as a big fan of the horror genre ("You’re talking to a man who's slaughtered a thousand zombies. I'm a man practiced in the dark arts") and recalled how keen he was to work with Kent and Del Toro.
"I took it very, very seriously," he remembered. "When [horror is] done well, it's beautiful. Don't Look Now, The Shining, they're sort of essentially about loss and all trauma or relationships in crisis. They'll never recover from the death of a child, no one does. But they can certainly try and live on and continue to love each other. Those are the overarching themes in this thing. That's a really exciting area for actors to explore.
"So much of the fear is this kind of psychological pressure cooker. That's the bit I love, when you're watching a movie and you realize you've been holding your breath for three minutes," Lincoln continued. "I think that what we've shot will operate on that level as well as the emotional level of Nancy and Edgar's trauma."
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