How Paul Feig Pulled Off That Wild Twist In The Housemaid

For the majority of The Housemaid, it’s pretty clear that something’s off with the picture-perfect family of the Winchesters. When Nina Winchester (Amanda Seyfried) hires the desperate Millie Calloway (Sydney Sweeney) to be her housemaid, she seems sweet and normal, if a little airheaded. Pregnancy hormones, she reveals conspiratorially to Millie. But don’t tell her husband, she wants it to be a surprise ...

However, when Millie arrives the next day to clean the Winchesters’ gorgeous, modern house, she finds it a mess. Nina greets her hurriedly, her airheaded nature now appearing to have fully graduated to erratic. And when Nina’s husband Andrew (Brandon Sklenar) and young daughter Cecelia (Indiana Elle) arrive home a little later, they both seem clueless as to why Millie’s there.

“You have to really pull one over on them.”

Thus begins the twisted tale of The Housemaid, based on the 2022 novel of the same name by Freida McFadden. The New York Times bestseller was a huge hit in the vein of the post-Gone Girl thriller, thanks to a shocking twist hidden in its latter half. But director Paul Feig, who had honed a skill for campy melodrama with his A Simple Favor movies, wanted to still retain that “rug pull” for movie audiences.

“You just have to misdirect the audience majorly,” Feig tells Inverse.

And Feig thinks he’s done his job. At a few test screenings he attended for his new thriller, he was delighted to see the audience reacting in all the right ways, before the movie completely upends their expectations. “A lot of people cheer and are like, ‘Yay, she's gone. Boo, we hate her,’” Feig recalls. But then “we’re just having fun in the moments when you're like, ‘Oh, thank God.’”

Inverse spoke to Feig about how he maintains the delicate balance between comedy and drama, why the movie wouldn’t have worked without Amanda Seyfried and Sydney Sweeney, and why the shocking twist works so well.

Warning! Spoilers ahead for The Housemaid.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

When you first got attached to direct The Housemaid, was it originally the campy thriller that it came out to be?

I don't consider it campy at all. No, it was everything that I like about a thriller: the same thing that I had in Simple Favor, which is a mystery that has a giant twist [with] room for fun. It's pretty heavy and the subject matter is pretty heavy. It's about abuse and all that, but it's the fun of retribution, I would say. And also the fun of misdirecting an audience so entirely that I knew I could put my stamp on it while being very true to the genre because that's all I really care about with any movie I do. And if it's like Spy and it's a spy comedy, I still want to make a real spy movie. I just want it to be funny. Not a spoof. There still has to be real danger. There has to be real stakes and motion and investment for the audience. And so that's what this has. It's just much darker. This is just a very, very, very dark comedy at the end of the day.

So apart from A Simple Favor and, of course, The Housemaid, you are known as a comedy director. When you came to this movie, did you intend to inject more comedy? Or was that already kind of there in the script?

I think it's hard baked in. Anything that's extreme has a ... I won't say a comedic bend to it, but it has the potential for comedy, like a comedic reaction from an audience because it's like horror. That's why there's so much comedy in horror. And that's why Zach Cregger and Jordan Peele, those of us who come from comedy, like playing in this world because we are eliciting a very primal emotion from you. Laughter is a very primal type of emotion. And so fear and reacting and being tense and jumping and being startled or being leaning forward and being like, "Oh, no," is right next to, "And I'm going to laugh because I need to release that tension." So if you can play with those two things and not let the comedy subvert the tension and the drama and the dark places and the serious places, and use it as a release valve, then that's kind of the perfect formula for us in comedy.

This movie deals with some pretty dark themes, like abuse. How do you walk that line, and balance the tones between some of the more serious elements and the more heightened elements of this film?

You're dealing with extremes. Honestly, all movies are about extremes. The ones that aren't, I find very boring because I like extreme characters, I like extreme situations, but they have to be treated real. When these things tip over into camp and into spoof and parody and satire and all that is when it's not played real. It's kind of played like, "We know this is crazy, so let's ..." And on my set, we treat everything dead serious. And that just makes the chance for it to be potentially funny at some point work, but it has to be, again, it has to be within the safe moments or the release moments of a very tense situation.

“You're dealing with extremes.”

Let's talk about the cast. Do you think that Amanda Seyfried, Sydney Sweeney, Brandon Sklenar hold the secret to balancing those tones because they walk that line in a lot of ways?

Yeah. Without them, I'm nothing. And they were able to play everything so dead serious, but at the extremes. Obviously, Amanda's really in the extremes with her character because she's keeping us so off our game as an audience and keeping Millie off her game of like, "Is she nuts? Is she just hormonal because of the pregnancy? What's going ... Is she just f**king with me?" But then I love how Syd plays this. We think she's the sweet, innocent character, this poor girl who's down on her luck. And then to slowly reveal, no, this person, if pushed to the edge, is like, "Watch out. Get out of her way." And she's much smarter than we kind of give her credit for when we first meet her.

And then Brandon, obviously, has the big giant turn in there, but he was so great at seeding in things in the first hour where you're like, "He's the greatest guy in the world." They're just things: The way he's picking these girls up all the time, his giant hand on their little tiny faces, that kind of thing. The way he'll kind of react to something, you see a flash where you're like, "Oh, he's under duress or whatever. Clearly, he's got this crazy wife." So it's them playing it dead serious, and that makes it work.

Let's talk about the twist at the end. How do you keep audience expectations in check when you're building up to such a big twist/rug pull?

Well, you have to really pull one over on them. And that's what I think I love so much about this movie, is we spend the first hour making you root for everything you should not be rooting for. Everything you are wanting is completely wrong. So when Andrew finally throws Nina out of the house, the audience is so happy. I've been at test screenings where a lot of people cheer and are like, "Yay, she's gone. Boo, we hate her." And then you just start going like, "Here's Millie. And she's just so happy to be in the house. She owns this thing." But she broke the dishes and he's kind of like, "Oh, you'll learn." Then we do the rug pull. You just have to misdirect the audience majorly.

“I don't consider it campy at all.”

The whole concept of being locked in the attic feels very much of a piece of gothic thrillers, like the crazy wife in the attic, literally. Was that an intentional sort of nod?

That's all from Freida's book. So to have that great of source material for a movie was really a treat because a lot of books, you have to change a lot to make them worthy of being on the big screen if they work great in a book. But that book really was kind of screen-ready. And then it was just really Rebecca Sonnenshine, our screenwriter, who adapted the book, did a great job at cherry-picking from the book and getting the flow right. And then I was able to go back in and go like, "Oh, now we've got a few extra pages that we can put something in. Let's bring this back. Let's bring this back that I think the audience would really like. And it's going to be really cinematic for me to shoot."

So after the Simple Favor movies and The Housemaid, is campy melodrama your new home? Or will you see you come back to comedy?

I consider all my movies to be kind of the same. Some are more straight-up comedy. Again, I never consider my movies to be comedies in another way. I consider all my movies to be dramas that are funny in some way because the baseline has to be a dramatic story with high stakes, whether they're emotional high stakes or physical high stakes or action high stakes. And then it just depends how extreme the situations are and how dark the situations are. A movie like Spy, the world is very serious. There's a nuclear bomb at stake, but the characters are all really extreme and kind of nutty. And then The Housemaid is the same kind of tension underneath, but I think the stakes are higher because it's abuse. It's a serious topic. And so we're just having fun in the moments when you're like, "Oh, thank God," or, "Boo. Oh, good. Take that person down." That's where the fun is. So I'll just keep making the movies the way I do.

The Housemaid is currently playing in theaters.