Alicia Witt: ‘My Longlegs character came into me and used me as a vessel’

You might not be sure how you’ve seen Alicia Witt, but you know you’ve at least seen her somewhere. The creepy little girl in David Lynch’s Dune? That was her. Cybill Shepherd’s stroppy teen daughter in the Nineties sitcom Cybill, and the Hollywood exec that romanced mobster Christopher Moltisanti on The Sopranos? Her, too. Few people can say they’ve played Madonna’s teenage girlfriend, kidnapped people on The Walking Dead and recorded music with Ben Folds. But this is how Alicia Witt’s always rolled.

“I was careful not to play the same type of role over and over again, because that’s what happens in Hollywood,” the 48-year-old actor and musician says. Whenever the offers became samey, she made sure to pivot. “Whether I went too extreme on that, I don’t know… but I’m not typecast at this point.”

Witt has come in from her garden, where she’s been pulling weeds and getting dirt under her fingernails. She lives a bucolic existence in Nashville, and it’s a pace of life that matches her countenance: thoughtful, gentle, poised if scrappy. If you first discovered her in the Nineties – perhaps as the haunted heroine of the teen slasher movie Urban Legend – you’ll remember her voice being deep, sardonic and laced with adolescent disdain, more Julia Stiles than Sarah Michelle Gellar. Now it’s higher, though. Kinder. Less of that sullen, Gen-X affect.

I’m talking to Witt because she’s in Longlegs, a ghoulish, brilliant thriller that has fast become one of the most anticipated movies of the summer. It revolves around a young FBI agent investigating a string of murders committed by a man known only as Longlegs (an unrecognisable, helium-voiced Nicolas Cage). To say more would be to spoil the film’s dark, sinewy secrets – its trailers, stocked with imagery of dolls, snakes and bright torches in cavernous barns, have been kept deliberately vague. But Witt steals the show. She plays the agent’s mother Ruth, a shell-shocked, impervious, God-fearing type whose love for her daughter is matched only by her madness. It’s a tough role that Witt imbues with powerful empathy. Partly because it hit close to home.

She and Longlegs’s director Osgood Perkins, she says, share a handful of personal commonalities that “most people in the world don’t – some traumatic experiences, some not-traumatic experiences”. Perkins lost his father, the Psycho star Anthony Perkins, to Aids, and his mother, the actor and model Berry Berenson, was aboard the first plane to hit the World Trade Center in the 9/11 attacks. Witt has experienced her own devastating familial loss: her mother and father were found dead in 2021, having succumbed to cold in a house lost to years of neglect.

“I never imagined I would have to talk about this publicly,” Witt wrote in a statement soon after. “I hadn’t been allowed inside my parents’ home for well over a decade ... I begged, cried, tried to reason with them, tried to convince them to let me help them move – but every time, they became furious with me, telling me I had no right to tell them how to live their lives.” She added that they were “fiercely stubborn, beautifully original souls”.

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Witt’s grief hangs over our conversation about Longlegs today. The night before she first read the script, she had a dream of a mother and daughter embracing one another – an image, she discovered the next day, that was present in Perkins’s film. The character, Witt explains, left her with “this goosebump feeling – as complicated and as complex as she is, I knew intrinsically how to channel her, and that I understood her on a visceral level”. She tells me something cosmic occurred on the set. “Ruth came into me and used me as a vessel – there was personal catharsis to it.” Witt has tears in her eyes at this point. She adds that she hasn’t seen Longlegs. “And I’m not going to. Last year I realised that I’d channelled her and put her out there on the screen, and that I don’t feel the need to see what she looks like from the outside. I know that’s not me up there.”

Longlegs is about a spate of ritualistic killings, but Witt also sees something more complex in it – about parental tragedy and generational trauma, and how the best of intentions can create its own kind of chaos. She begins to speak, slowly and apprehensively, about the woman she plays. “She wasn’t right [psychologically], and it wasn’t her fault. She certainly loved her daughter. But it’s complicated. And as cathartic as it was for me to channel her, I hope, despite the nature of this movie, it might be cathartic for some people watching it, too.”

Witt’s own parents were teachers, her mother once holding the Guinness World Records title for longest hair in the world. They raised Alicia and her little brother Ian in central Massachusetts, homeschooling them and marvelling at their early smarts. Witt was speaking at one month old and could recite Shakespeare by age three. It was a talent that got her on television, notably the American chat show That’s Entertainment!. She bristles, though, at the term “child prodigy”. “I didn’t think of myself as a brainiac,” she says. “I just had a brain that was good at certain things. I was advanced at piano, and I did well in competitions. But ‘wizkid’ or ‘genius’ set expectations that are awfully hard to live up to.”

That’s Entertainment! caught the eye of the casting directors for Lynch’s Dune, who were looking for a child who could convincingly convey thousands of years of knowledge in one tiny body. Witt was seven in the film, outfitted in an eerie black headdress, her eyes sparkling, alien blue. She’d go on to play Lara Flynn Boyle’s piano-playing kid sister in Lynch’s Twin Peaks, too, a role she’d reprise in the show’s revival 16 years later.

Witt moved to Los Angeles with her mother in 1990, when she was 16, and earned money playing piano at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. By the middle of the decade she had been anointed – in industry circles, at least – as one of Hollywood’s next big things. Starring roles, though, often evaded her at the last hurdle. She reportedly got close to the lead in Clueless, for instance, that went to Alicia Silverstone, while Sidney in Scream was between her, Neve Campbell and Brittany Murphy. Campbell got the nod. “I took it for granted,” Witt admits. “I didn’t realise I was in that rare category of people getting to audition for those leads. But I’m grateful in an odd way that some of the bigger ones didn’t go my way. I’m not sure I was ready for that.” She played a college student who is being stalked in Urban Legend and took the role home with her. “I wasn’t equipped to handle the darkness of it,” she says. “I had profound insomnia and depression. All the things [the character] was going through, I took on. I didn’t know how not to.”

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She also experienced many of the sadder tropes of being a young woman in Hollywood in the Nineties. There was a period of disordered eating, which she wrote about in her 2021 book Small Changes, and she tells me that – somewhat inevitably – she had numerous run-ins with Harvey Weinstein, the disgraced producer who seemed to champion, attack, tussle with or ruin absolutely anyone even vaguely famous back then. She expresses gratitude that his involvement with her never became sexual in nature, but she remembers the draconian contracts he’d force her to sign (he produced 1995’s Four Rooms, that aforementioned Madonna film), and the bizarre mind games he played with her.

“It was just wildly awful,” she says. “He would dangle [roles] in front of me and try to get me to pass on [other roles], because he wanted to have that power over me.” One incident she remembers involved Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man – she was in contention for Mary-Jane Watson, a role ultimately played by Kirsten Dunst. “Harvey offered me this big role in a film but said I had to pass up a screen test for Spider-Man in order to get the role. Otherwise, I would have to audition for it. And I wasn’t going to pass on a screen test for Spider-Man, you know?” When Witt chose to screen test, the Weinstein offer fell away. “That wasn’t MeToo stuff but just business awfulness, which was rampant in the Nineties and the early 2000s.”

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Witt’s career has fluctuated from there. “There have been spurts of great busyness, then times when it’s been slower,” she says. The downtime, though, allowed her to build a music career from scratch, tour the world and record songs – she’s released a number of studio albums and EPs of lovely, bluesy, piano-driven country-pop – and to build the kind of CV that feels broad, interesting and at times deeply surreal. For every John Waters movie on it – she’s excellent as a deranged “kamikaze filmmaker” in his ribald Cecil B Demented – or supporting roles in films such as Two Weeks Notice, she’s performed from within an enormous dandelion costume on The Masked Singer.

Longlegs is Witt’s most high-profile role in years, but she doesn’t necessarily see it changing her world. “I don’t live in LA any more, and I have such a beautiful, grounded life – which I treasure,” she says. “I’m older now and better able to take on these roles and give my all to them, but I also don’t wait by the phone, like acting is the only thing I’ve got going on.”

She smiles, her eyes moist, and then she’s gone. She has a garden to tend to.

‘Longlegs’ is in cinemas, and Witt will play London’s Lexington on 26 September – tickets are available here