The latest adaptation of Stephen King’s debut horror novel offers a very different take on Margaret White, but her actress Samantha Sloyan believes it was a smart choice.
“[Showrunner] Mike [Flanagan] fundamentally changed the Margaret-Carrie relationship, so I felt like it unhitched me from the past,” Sloyan told Empire Online. Whereas past actresses for Margaret may have felt pressured to measure up to Piper Laurie’s iconic 1976 portrayal of the cruel, overzealous evangelical mother, Sloyan was free to fully do her own thing.
Margaret White is still a bad mother in the new eight-part Prime Video series, but her mistreatment of Carrie comes from a well-meaning place. She wants to protect her daughter but doesn’t understand how. The result is a Margaret that is funnier and more complicated; she’s more frustrating than scary, but in a way that feels surprisingly realistic and inspired.
Related: Stephen King Approves New ‘Carrie’ Series, As Fans Call Its 2026 Twist ‘Disturbing’
“We’re starting from a place of a loving mother,” Sloyan told PEOPLE. “It wasn’t that hard to empathize with her, because I just felt like she was a mother who was having a lot of pain watching her daughter grow up and leave her — what she felt was leaving her.”
Although Sloyan offered a fresh new take on the character — a breath of fresh air after so many similar adaptations treading the same ground — she did still take some inspiration from Piper Laurie’s Margaret.
“I liked [Laurie’s] danger, her unpredictability, the ethic of terror, and I wanted to make sure that I still had moments of that,” Sloyan told Empire Online. “So I really tried to pull from her performance instead of forgetting it.”
Helping Sloyan’s portrayal of White shine is that the role was written specifically for her. Sloyan has worked with showrunner Mike Flanagan on six projects before Carrie, and Flanagan wanted her as Margaret from day one.
“It’s incredible,” Sloyan said about the experience. “I don’t think you could ask for a better situation than a writer you admire having you in his ear as he writes a character. And he’ll really fight for somebody if it’s something that he believes in, and he was willing to fight for me for this one.”
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