Bruce Greenwood Still Has No Sympathy for the Pharma Patriarch of Fall of the House of Usher

The Fall of the House of Usher is the last of Mike Flanagan's Netflix projects, and also his darkest one. Inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe, the show tells the story of the rise of Roderick Usher as the head of a powerful pharmaceutical company, and the fall of his family as each one of Roderick's children dies a horrible death. Flanagan says his goodbyes to the streamer with what is by far the bloodiest of his shows, one that constantly features gruesome imagery and gnarly deaths that impart judgment on its characters. The result is one of the best shows of 2023, one worth revisiting as the year comes to a close — especially because of its cast.

Though featuring a great ensemble made out of Mike Flanagan regulars, the series’s standout performance is Bruce Greenwood as the patriarch Roderick Usher. The actor was not meant to be a part of this series, but after Frank Langella was fired for unacceptable behavior on set, Greenwood was tapped on a Wednesday to fly to set the following Sunday and take on the role midway through production. We won't know how Langella was going to play the Usher patriarch, but one thing is for sure, Greenwood is not just doing a Logan Roy impression.

Even as we see all the horrible things Roderick Usher did to build his pharma empire, Greenwood infuses the character with a charisma that almost makes you root for him. Likewise, throughout his meeting with U.S. Attorney C. Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumbly) to confess his crimes, there's a nuanced sense of guilt to Greenwood's Roderick that makes him more layered than the cartoonishly evil monster he could have easily been.

As 2023 closes out, Primetimer talked to The Fall of the House of Usher star Bruce Greenwood about joining the cast last minute, tackling Mike Flanagan's many monologues, and why he doesn't think Roderick deserves any sympathy.

How did Mike Flanagan approach you about this show?

Well, Mike called me at the last minute; we'd worked together before on Gerald's Game and Doctor Sleep, so we're friends. It was a Wednesday. He called and said, "I know you're working but can you be here Sunday?" And I asked if I could read it, which he said of course, but it is about 550 pages and I had to answer by the next day. So I read as much as I could and I was intoxicated by his use of language, and the story's fantastic. So I was on a plane that Sunday morning.

How does this affect the way you approach the character, not having that much time to prepare or rehearse? Are there certain elements of the script that you cling on to?

Well, I was just clinging on to remembering the dialogue. To some degree, one of the advantages of that was that I didn't have the opportunity to really prepare in a traditional way, so it required that you just let stuff happen. I just sort of threw caution to the winds. And Mike was there so he instructed me to lean a certain way or the other. I was getting feedback like that really early on.

And one thing that really drew me to the character that also helped was that he's got these two major problems. Either the world is a place that he'd never imagined, where somebody can reach out of another plane to affect what happens in your life, or he's going mad. So either way, it's bad news. Trying to play those two things and balance those two, what he appreciates in those moments where he thinks he's going mad and what he appreciates in those moments when he thinks this is all really happening. That was a balance.

Both Mikes, Mike Fimognari and Mike Flanagan were really helpful at reminding me where Roderick was at any moment. But once you get into it, you take a big breath and you're underwater and you're just letting the riptide carry you wherever it's gonna carry you.

In those scenes where Roderick is seeing these ghosts, do you have an answer as to whether it's real or not that you use for the performance?

Sure I do. In some moments, I'm seeing what I'm seeing, but it's not real because I'm losing my mind, and that's terrifying. And in some moments I'm not losing my mind and I've been given a window into another world. Although it's horrifying, there's a certain power that comes with the idea that you have a window into another world. For a guy with an ego that size, that's very attractive.

There's a subtle sense of guilt in your scenes with Carl Lumbly's Dupin, and I wanted to ask you about giving some humanity to Roderick.

I think Roderick finds it very difficult to distinguish between true remorse and feigned remorse. He's so used to lying to himself that you could be forgiven for thinking that he's full of remorse when he's actually doing a performance of remorse.

Being able to distinguish between the two is one of the things that confused his life right from the beginning. Zach Gilford so cleverly played this guy who was torn between his avaricious ambitions and being controlled to some degree by his sister. He balanced that and his hunger and his ego, along with the idea that he wanted to be a poet and he wanted to be in love with his wife.

When I arrived to do those parts that made it seem as though Roderick had a heart and a soul, you wonder whether or not that was a holdover from the real man way back when who would've been a poet. Or it is a construct that Roderick carried with him to manipulate.

That is fascinating, because more often than not you hear actors playing villains talking about finding the humanity and not fully buying into their evil side. You seem firmly in the camp of Roderick is fully a monster.

Yes. He makes a deal early on, and he admits it at the very end. His real confession is that he knew the whole time that he was gonna get to the top on a pile of bodies. That's the confession that I connected to. All this other stuff, confessing about how the kids died and how Roderick manipulated the market, that's, that's not as big as "I knew it."

But the thing that's ugly about that, in my view, is that there's a certain amount of pride in the way he says that. It's not that he says it with an understanding of the pain and the agony he caused. He doesn't. He's completely separated himself from that. There are moments like when we watch all the bodies falling when you get just a tiny little glimpse into the possibility that he may feel some responsibility and remorse. But those moments pinch off really quickly for him.

You mentioned Zach Gilford earlier. Did you get to talk to him at all before filming, to marry the two performances?

I had one conversation with Zach over the phone or maybe it was Zoom. Our voices are not dissimilar, so that was an advantage, and I think we look as though we could be related, so that's also an advantage. But in terms of trying to marry or at least reference what he had already done with what I was planning to do, not really. First of all, you never know what kind of range an actor has given a director or an editor, and you don't know what those choices are gonna be. So to try and to have a conversation about, "Oh, you're playing it this way, I'll try and reference that," in the edit, it may be completely exploded and reconstructed and reimagined by the editor. So I didn't think about trying to chase that, no.

You've worked with Mike Flanagan on films before. Does the dynamic change when you're doing a TV show, with more time to explore the character?

No. I mean, there's never enough time, no matter what you're doing. But one of the great things that Mike does, and that Mike Fimognari now also does, is that they do a bit of rehearsing for maybe 20 minutes before a shoot to understand where the cameras are going to be and whatnot. And before every scene, Mike will say, "This is the scene in which Roderick discovers X, Y, and Z."

And this is the scene in which Madeline [Usher, played by Mary McDonnell] comes to him, and this has just happened, and this is about to happen. So, he gives the entire crew this context, and it's a great reminder for the actors because you're reminded of the larger form of the story. It also creates an environment where everybody understands they're here to watch something happen. It's not just another scene, we're here to watch part of a story being told. So everybody's conscious of where this scene fits in the story and how important it is. For me, I love hearing that context be provided in such an explicit, articulate way.

Tell me about filming the lemons speech. I can't imagine doing long monologues with so little time to prepare can be easy.

There were lots of those, yes. I had stuff taped to the dashboard of my car to memorize them. But there's that one when I say to Carl that my character has cerebral autosomal dominant arteriopathy with subcortical infarcts and leukoencephalopathy. I couldn't get that. I just couldn't get it. It was taped to the dashboard of my car. It was taped all over the house. It was taped all over my hotel room. That one did me in. And when I was first rehearsing with Carl, I said, "that CADASIL thing is killing me." And he just rattled it off like that. It was just like nothing to him. But the dialogue is so beautiful. I just wish I'd had more time. I'm sure I'd do it completely differently now. The more you live with it, the more it evolves.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Rafael Motamayor is a freelance writer and critic based in Norway.