Mary Elizabeth Winstead Talks The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, Scott Pilgram vs. The World & Sky High

Zach Sang Show

Sangasong, LLC

Tv & Film, Music

4.7 • 658 Ratings

🗓️ 22 October 2025

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Mary Elizabeth Winstead has, so far, had a wildly diverse career, but there is one genre that continues to crop up again and again — horror/thrillers are definitely in the 40-year-old’s sweetspot. From her early days on witchy soap Passions to Wolf Lake to Final Destination 3 to 10 Cloverfield Lane to Black Christmas, Winstead loves the rush of being creeped out and freaked out.

The North Carolina-born actor joins us on the couch to discuss her filmography, in particular her latest work, a remake of the 1992 classic The Hand The Rocks The Cradle, this time co-starring next gen scream queen Maika Monroe (It Follows, Longlegs), directed by Mexican filmmaker Michelle Garza in her first major studio motion picture. It’s domestic horror at its most intimate — channeling the fears and anxieties of new motherhood, while weaving in privilege guilt, and a haunting moral ambiguity. Which, as you might imagine for a new mother herself — Winstead has a son with husband Ewan McGregor — was not hard to identify with and tap into.

We discuss all this plus action films, the cult of Ramona Flowers and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, working with Bruce Willis as his daughter in two Die Hard movies, her critically acclaimed turn as an alcoholic groping towards sobriety in indie film Smashed, not to mention meeting Ewan on the set of Fargo the TV series, both of them working in the Star Wars universe, and her early years as an extrovert-turned-introvert finding an outlet in performance.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, beautiful human. I'm Zach. That is Dan and stay. We welcome to the studio. An icon. Say hello to Mary Elizabeth Winston, everybody.
0:12.0	Hello.
0:13.0	I mean, we're here to talk about the hand that rocks the cradle.
0:18.0	Yes.
0:19.0	This is a remake of a 1992 thriller,
0:22.5	but it definitely feels like a whole new conversation,
0:24.2	and it feels very much rooted in truth and motherhood.
0:30.6	It's scary as shit, dude.
0:32.8	It's really, it's dark.
0:37.4	Can you explain to me your relationship with this character? Because it's dark.
0:40.1	Can you explain to me your relationship with this character?
0:43.9	Because it's also falling into your plate at a very unique time in your life.
0:46.5	What's your relationship with all of it?
0:47.6	And did you watch the original?
0:53.8	Well, first, I got the script, you know, as you do, from my agent.
1:31.1	And kind of right off the bat, I was like, hmm, I was intrigued. But, you know, cautiously intrigued, I guess, because, um, you just never know with a kind of a genre piece that's got two women pitted against each other. It's kind of like, okay, what's this going to be? But, you know, I can see, okay, it's a female director. Interesting, interesting. So you didn't know it was a remake? I knew it was a remake. Okay. But I had never seen the original. So I was familiar with the title. I was familiar with the, I remembered when it came out. I have, like, visions of memories trailer coming out and like people talking about it and ooh, what's this?
1:37.0	And I can remember the feeling of like being younger and going, this is like some movie that's getting people talking.
1:39.6	And, you know, I was aware of the original.
1:41.1	But I hadn't seen it.
1:44.5	So I read the script and I was kind, I was just blown away.
1:49.9	I was like, you know, there was so much empathy for the characters, for all of the characters,
1:56.6	which is something I'm always drawn to in a script. Um, and in a director and a collaborator, like anything, it's just like having empathy for the people in your story. Like to me, that's really
	...

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