As Verna (word puzzle fans will notice this is an anagram for “raven”), Gugino plays the ultimate puppet master, orchestrating the titular collapse of the Usher family. Rather than simply adapting one Poe story into a series that ends up being a thinly veiled depiction of the infamous Sackler pharmaceutical dynasty, Flanagan rolls the dice on the complete works of the Gothic writer and combines elements from the creepy collection of short stories and poems. The chimpanzee moment in Episode 2 is one that walks up to the line of absurdity, especially so early in the season, but it works, and I’m pretty sure that is all because of Gugino. In Usher, the showrunner has given one of his frequent collaborators an even larger supernatural playground to showcase dueling emotions, calling on her to lean into preposterous scenarios (like mimicking an ape) without breaking a sweat. Gugino’s impressive ability to simultaneously portray contradictory emotions has been utilized with maximum effect by Flanagan in the past. If you are worried your mind started wandering while reading that list and you are now in an Edgar Allan Poe-induced fever dream, fear not, as Gugino really does inhabit all of those identities in Flanagan’s last spooky limited-series Netflix offering-yes, including the chimpanzee. Thanks to The Fall of the House of Usher, she can, among other things, add a bartender, a woman with a medical crisis, a sex worker, a security guard, death, a raven, and a chimpanzee to the list. ![]() Across Mike Flanagan’s expanding universe, Carla Gugino has played a ghost, a mother on the verge of a breakdown, a broken-hearted narrator, and a wife handcuffed to a bed. Ryan Murphy isn’t the only showrunner who has a reliably great pool of actors to put through different scary scenarios.
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