Month: February 2021

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Imagine what it must have felt like to be Rep. Lauren Underwood, the youngest Black woman in Congress, on the day when the halls of our nation’s Capitol building were stormed by an angry mob of white supremacist election deniers, some of whom sought to hang legislators by noose on makeshift gallows they had constructed outside.

Underwood had arrived at her office early that morning, after first stopping to receive her second dose of the coronavirus vaccine. She was watching the electoral certification process on TV (not all members attended in person due to the pandemic) when she saw some of her colleagues being rushed off the floor. As the images were playing out onscreen, she says she started hearing loud noises—“bangs or gunshots, almost like cannons”—in the hallway outside. It was only her second time in her new office; she didn’t yet know the escape routes. As she and her chief of staff barricaded the door with furniture, her phone started “making all these noises I’d never heard,” alerting her that nearby buildings had been evacuated due to bomb threats. There was no actionable information, Underwood tells me two days after the attack, just “Shelter in place,” “Stay put,” “Be quiet.”

She ventured into the adjoining empty office of a House colleague so that she could peek into the hallway to see what was going on. Her stomach must have sank when she realized the door had shut behind her, locking her out of her office and leaving her without her phone, computer, and iPad—all of which remained inside. She had only her member pin to identify her.

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Underwood was eventually escorted to an undisclosed location, but what should have been a safe space was anything but when she realized the room was crammed full of Republicans who refused to put on masks. It was “the most direct superspreader exposure I had ever been in,” says Underwood, 34. “After all those months of being so careful with COVID…” (She has a heart condition called supraventricular tachycardia and is sure that if she got the virus, “I’d be symptomatic, and it would be rough.”)

For four hours, Underwood and other members were told they couldn’t leave. No bathroom breaks, no food—“you just had to sit there,” she says. She had someone text her sister to say, “I’m with Lauren. She’s in an undisclosed location without her phone. She’s safe.” The sergeant at arms came in after about two hours and said, “We haven’t yet secured the Capitol. We are waiting for reinforcements to arrive.” What? How is this possible? Underwood thought.

Colleagues trickled in, some visibly shaken with harrowing stories of what they had seen and heard. “We were so vulnerable. We were wide open. It’s just, like, the grace of God that it was not worse,” Underwood says. “Not just for us as individual human beings, but for our country. They could have destroyed the legislative branch that day.”

And then, just like that, after about an hour, she was back on the House floor, squabbling with her colleagues about Arizona and whether to throw out its electors. “I felt all the emotions,” Underwood says. “They were attacking our democracy, our Constitution. This was not some small thing. It was not a riot. It was not a difference of opinion, a difference of perspective, or ideas—no, this was something very different from that.”

And frankly, it’s hard for her not to take the attack personally. “You had these folks—terrorists, I call them terrorists—who forced their way into the Capitol, convinced that they had every right to be there with a white supremacy ideology,” Underwood says. “That image of the man with the Confederate flag in the Capitol? It’s just so deeply offensive and un-American,” she continues, viscerally affected by the photograph seared in her brain. “I have had, I would say, kind of a tough time during some parts of my time in Congress. Feeling personally attacked. Feeling personally hunted. This is different. This is bigger than just me. But I’m within a subset of people with extra venom directed my way. That’s how I feel.”

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Underwood says she was scared to get on the plane the next morning to fly home with some of the same people who had stormed the Capitol. “They were allowed to walk right out the front door,” she says—and on to her plane. She disguised herself, forgoing what she calls her “typical millennial congressional look” for some “really cool” goggles and a KN95, and pulling the hood of her winter coat tight around her face. “These people are from my community. They know who I am,” Underwood explains. “And what I want people to remember is, Terrorism is designed to instill fear. People asked me, How are you doing? I’m like, ‘It’s terrifying. Literally.’ That underlying terror is there, and it’s omnipresent. While they might not have succeeded in stopping us from executing our constitutional responsibility, that fear has taken root in a real way.”

Like Charlottesville and other painful and heartbreaking moments over the past four years, the insurrection forced us all to confront the very worst elements of our society. “It makes us look at ourselves differently, because this is who we are—or it’s not who we are, but it is who we’ve become,” Underwood says. “How do we fix this as one nation?” I ask her if she has the answer to the question she posed and at first she replies with a defeated-sounding, “No.”

But after a moment of reflection, she points to the one thing she knows best—the thing that got her elected to Congress in the first place—as the likely way forward. “I believe, even with my constituents who are the most ardent supporters of the MAGA philosophy, that they can respect and understand what it means to pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States and what it means to uphold the Constitution,” Underwood says. “While they may disagree with how I choose to exercise that oath, we have not gone so far that we cannot have a conversation.”

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Illinois’ 14th Congressional District—the historically Republican northern and western suburbs of Chicago—was never meant to be won by a Democrat. A decade ago, the Illinois Democratic Party redrew the district lines to corral as many Republican votes as possible in the 14th in order to maintain more favorable odds in other districts. The gerrymander was so successful statewide that a Politico reporter quipped that the House Speaker had “punched his ticket to the partisan hall of fame.” But then along came Lauren Underwood.

Back when she was first running for Congress in 2018, there were so many articles questioning whether Underwood, a young Black Democrat running in an overwhelmingly white suburban and rural +5 Republican district, could win that she told New York magazine she stopped reading stories about her candidacy. Yes, the odds were stacked against her—the district had been held by Dennis Hastert, the longest-serving Republican Speaker of the House, for 20 years, and Donald Trump had won it in 2016—but this was her hometown, her lifelong neighbors. And some cities, like Naperville, the state’s third largest city, where Underwood was raised and still lives (around the corner from her parents), had been trending blue in recent years. So how dare the doubters think they knew the voters in the 14th better than she did?

In the end, she proved everyone wrong. In her 2018 primary, Underwood beat out six white men to receive the Democratic nomination, and then she beat a four-term Republican incumbent (also a white man) to win the general election. But it’s how she pulled off her victory that makes Underwood’s win truly remarkable. Unlike some candidates running in purple districts, she didn’t campaign on being a moderate because, well, she isn’t. She ran on an openly liberal agenda, embracing affordable and accessible health care—drawing on her experience as a registered nurse and a former senior advisor at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services—as well as public education, paid leave, and affordable child care.

And rather than shy away from discussing such topics in certain communities where they might be less favorable, Underwood simply showed up and explained with conviction why she believes the things she believes. “It’s important to remember—number one—folks share values,” she says. “In my community, for example, people believe that healthcare is a human right and it shouldn’t be limited to the wealthiest Americans.” Even the MAGA people, I ask? “Yes, those folks can’t afford their insulin and they’re mad about it,” Underwood insists. “When you talk about how much things cost and who gets it and who doesn’t, the Venn diagram is huge. If we take the time to talk to each other—there are so many people who feel like they haven’t been seen. This is not about policy to me. This is about representation. Do you feel like someone has your back?”

When she went door-to-door, farmers would tell her no Democrat had knocked on their doors in 10 years. And what Underwood says she heard “loud and clear,” from those ruby- red rural parts of her district to the more moderate suburbs, is that both sides felt like no one cared. “No one was showing up for them. No one understood what was going on with their families. No one understood their fears or hopes,” she says. “And so when we literally physically showed up and talked to them, listened and were responsive, and engaged them on the issues that mattered to them, we were able to earn their support.”

The conversations often had very little to do with politics or which side of the aisle she sits on. “I will show up in the smallest town. I have towns with less than 100 households, and we show up and talk to them,” Underwood says. “Their issue may not be healthcare. It might be a problem with their sewer system. Great! That’s not partisan. But no one had bothered to show up for them on that.”

Joshua Lott

Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) has witnessed Underwood’s ability to connect with voters firsthand. “We did a series of events together where we would sit down at a local shop, and a dozen to two dozen people would come in. It was a very intimate setting, and I was just really impressed by how she was out in the community at a very granular level, talking to people one-on-one,” Duckworth says. “She’s very down-to-earth, very matter of fact, and she really connects with people.”

Underwood doesn’t try to woo voters by claiming she believes in things she doesn’t; she levels with them. “I like to flip it on its head,” she explains. “People are like, Oh, you vote whatever percentage with your party. And I’m like, Well, would you have rather I voted against the Violence Against Women Act to change a percentage? Do you want us not to be in the Paris Climate Agreement? Because let’s talk to my farmers about climate change—they will tell you how it impacts their businesses and their families. So then people are like, ‘No, no, you’re right, you’re right. Just do the right thing.”

Doing the right thing once she got to Congress meant not forgetting about the conversations that got her there, even if the issues weren’t always the most headline-grabbing. “I go hard for my farmers,” Underwood says. It’s why she supported the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, and why she pushed for bailout checks. “I fought for those checks, and my farmers knew it,” she says. And remember the MAGA folks pissed off about insulin? She went hard for them, too, writing a bill to reduce the cost of insulin by getting lower-cost, generic insulin to market faster, and fighting for it until it was signed by President Trump.

Such actions don’t necessarily win her social media followers or a posse in Congress, but they did earn her a unanimous endorsement from Illinois Farm Bureau’s political action committee during her reelection campaign, a rarity among Democrats. (In 2018, they endorsed her Republican opponent.) “When I say to my constituents that I am willing to work with the president to deliver for them, I mean it,” she says. “You just have to deliver for people. It’s not about partisanship.”

As Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) says, selling a liberal agenda to Republican voters is “all in how you talk about it.” She related to Underwood, having first run for election in a red House district herself. “We’re progressive, but we have some real common sense that allows us to win people over,” Gillibrand says. “We know where the sweet spot is. We know how to be for our progressive values, but also bring people together.” It’s that ability, Gillibrand says, that makes Underwood “the future of our party.”

You might think that all of the above means Underwood sailed to reelection last year, with no challenger in sight. But it was 2020, and nothing followed logical order. Her opponent was dairy magnet Jim Oberweis, then an Illinois Republican state senator, who has run for higher office (U.S. Senate, House, governor) six times and lost. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t a threat: The Oberweis name has been around a long time, and is very well-known as a popular ice cream business with locations across the district.

Rhonisha Franklin

Oberweis also has a Trumpian streak: He harnessed his personal wealth to win the primary and spouted baseless, fear-mongering conspiracy theories about Underwood. He even has a second residence in Florida. Add to that the fact that Illinois 14 had never reelected a Democrat to a full term, and once again, the odds were not in Underwood’s favor. “We came into the 2020 cycle knowing that we’re going to have to make history again and knowing that the dynamics of the race were going to be very different,” Underwood says. “The ads from my opponent were so ugly and hateful, just mean-spirited, and just false—let’s also say that.”

When the Black Lives Matter movement took hold this summer, Underwood was heartened by the rallies in her district. “I’ve lived in this community my whole life and growing up, I never had a Black teacher. There was only one other Black kid in my class. So to see our communities step up—I mean, every town and city had a protest, a rally, a march, something—I was so touched.”

But she didn’t dare participate. Her opponent was already pushing the idea that the district “would not be safe with Lauren Underwood in office,” she says. “I knew my opponent was going to weaponize my race in this election, and if he could make me ‘an other,’ like, ‘Oh, is she really from here? Can we really trust her? What’s she really up to?’ Then they would be able to separate me from my accomplishments.”

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So she did what she always does: kept talking to people. She held “porch parties,” virtual story times for families, and drive-in rallies, and just hoped that voters would believe what they were seeing right in front of their faces over what they were reading on the internet. “My opponent would come out and say, ‘You need to be scared of Lauren Underwood,’ and people would be like, ‘Well, I just saw her. We know her. She helped my neighbor get back from Haiti during COVID, she helped us get money from our VA benefits, or whatever. That’s what enabled us to break through the noise and pull out ahead—the work we had done.”

Her worst day on the campaign was election night. With mail-in ballots still being counted, Oberweis held a small lead. “In my short time in politics, I have never actually been losing,” Underwood says. “Even in my first primary, we just dominated. It’s been like these fairy-tale stories.” That night, she felt like the fairytale might come to an end. “You know how in movies when something happens and all of a sudden your vision zones out and there’s this ringing in your ears? That’s how I felt.”

On November 8, five days after the election, Underwood pulled ahead. But it would be nine days before the race was called in her favor; in the end, she beat Oberweis by just 5,374 votes. Oberweis attended freshman orientation for the 117th Congress and has filed a “Notice of Contest” with the Clerk of the House of Representatives.

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Given all of the election result challenges, Underwood assumed she wasn’t alone in facing an official contest. “I just figured this was happening to a lot of other people because their opponents also hadn’t conceded,” Underwood explains. “But no, just me. And this is not about ‘poor Lauren,’ but it fits a pattern.” Two weeks after she won her first race in 2018, an opponent announced his intent to run in 2020. “Before I was even sworn in, there was someone running against me,” Underwood says. “Now, months after Election Day, my opponent still cannot accept the results.” (She was served the contest paperwork on the morning of the Capitol attack.)

Her opponent’s challenge won’t be successful, but still, such things have a way of making a person feel like they don’t belong. “I feel like I’m in an institution that was not built for me—that my presence is disruptive in so many ways,” Underwood says. “Within a subset of our party there’s this really warm embrace of my candidacy and my service and these ideas that I have envisioned for our country, but at work, it sometimes feels very different. That’s the difference between politics and policymaking—there’s always this tension. Even after this election, I thought we would have more young women of color coming and there weren’t. It’s tough.”

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Underwood is doing her part to get more women in the room. She founded the Farm Team PAC to support candidates in Northern Illinois. Twenty-one of the 24 winning candidates she endorsed this past cycle were women. One of them is Maura Hirschauer, a 43-year-old from Batavia, Illinois, who had never been involved in politics until she signed up to volunteer for Underwood’s 2018 campaign. “I had no political aspirations, really, until candidates like Lauren opened the door,” says Hirschauer.

Hirschauer first met Underwood at an event Underwood hosted at the second Women’s March. (Underwood’s mom had knitted pink hats for everyone to wear; Hirschauer’s daughter still wears hers.) “Everything about her was really relatable and reassuring,” Hirschauer says. “When you’re with Lauren, you feel like she’s making really responsible decisions. She’s so thoughtful and has a presence way beyond her years. She will take a stance, but not before she’s weighed all of the pros and cons for the district. And I think that’s why she was able to win.”

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When Hirschauer’s daughter, Maggie, who was 10 at the time, wrote a statement saying she wanted to make some changes to active shooter drill procedures in schools, only one candidate heard her out. Oberweis “was incredibly dismissive and intimidating and not open at all,” Hirschauer says, while Underwood invited Maggie to speak at a Capitol Hill press conference on gun violence and school safety.

It was the first time Hirschauer had seen the government really work for the people. She was so inspired that she launched her own campaign for the Illinois House of Representatives—and won. “Lauren is a different type of politician and really opened everyone’s minds to the idea that you don’t have to fit a certain mold to lead,” Hirschauer says. “She made my daughter feel heard, and it was really cool.”

Rumors of romance between Kourtney Kardashian and Travis Barker have been heating up recently, and these two seem to know exactly how to fan the flames. On Saturday, Barker posted a note from Kardashian on his Instagram story.

The note reads: “To lots of fun adventures. May we destroy each other completely. Love, Kourtney.”

Travis BarkerInstagram

That “destroy” line is seemingly a callback to a tweet Barker sent on Feb. 17:

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Commenters on Twitter appeared to be confused about what, exactly, he meant by this.

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Others took “destroy” to be code for “love” and a message to Kardashian.

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Last month, the two continued to spark rumors when they both posted photos from Kris Jenner’s Palm Springs property. In the past, Barker denied rumors about his involvement with Jenner.

“Kourtney’s like a dear friend,” he told People at the iHeart Music Radio Awards in 2019. “That’s it. I mean, I love her to death. I love her family to death. But yeah, just friends.”

Despite rumors that Kardashian’s ex and the father of her three children, Scott Disick, will always be in love with her, Disick is involved with Amelia Gray Hamlin. On Valentine’s Day weekend, the two took a trip and had a date night out in Miami.

This follows Disick’s breakup from his girlfriend of three years, Sofia Richie. After an on-again, off-again relationship, he and Kardashian officially broke up in 2015.

“Kourtney has always been hesitant about getting back together with Scott or letting him in in a romantic sense,” a source told Us Weekly. “She has given him so many chances over the years after he has said that he is going to prove himself to her, and he seemingly still hasn’t in certain aspects.”

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Gigi Hadid and Zayn Malik welcomed their daughter, Khai, last September, and as of now, they plan to give her a quiet farm life in Pennsylvania. The usually private Hadid doesn’t usually share a lot of photos of her little family on social media.

For that reason, it was a big deal when, today, she began sharing several never-before-seen photos on her Instagram story. First, she posted a photo of Khai’s feet in footie pajamas with the prompt “post a picture from this date.” She added the note, (“doing it with dates just makes it easier/faster to find pics!! also more fun imo”). She added that Khai was napping, so she had a time to take part in this fun photo game.

Gigi HadidInstagram

For the date August 6, she shared that on that date, she chose a paint color for the nursery. Khai was born in late September.

Gigi HadidInstagram

Someone else asked to see a photo from exactly six months before, on February 6. She mentioned that this photo was taken “right before” she found out she was pregnant.

Gigi HadidInstagram

She posted this photo from September 8, just weeks before she gave birth. It appears she’s in the nursery; there are stuffed animals in the photo that look like they might be long to baby Khai now.

Gigi HadidInstagram

May 21, 2020:

Gigi HadidInstagram

Here’s one of Zayn walking Khai in her stroller in December:

Gigi HadidInstagram

Here’s a photo Hadid shared in June:

Gigi HadidInstagram

And a photo of her by the pool in August:

Gigi HadidInstagram

Khai’s little feet in November:

Gigi HadidInstagram

“turned half my office into khai’s playroom,” she wrote. Ummm…I’m very jealous of this playroom.

Khai’s sweet hand:

Look at this personalized snowsuit!!

Hadid wanted ribs when she was having pregnancy cravings, and they look…incredible, tbh:

Gigi HadidInstagram

Throughout most of her pregnancy, Hadid kept her pregnancy private from her social media accounts. But in August, she shared a series of maternity photos taken by fashion photographers Luigi and Iango in July.

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In September, just before she gave birth, Hadid shared this:

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From the looks of it, little Khai’s life is going to be well documented!

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Anne Hathaway guest-starred on RuPaul’s Drag Race Friday night, and when I say the drag queens were excited…I mean, have you seen a drag queen fangirl over someone? No one does it better. When the Oscar winner showed up, via video, to give the cast advice on their upcoming “rusical” musical-theater challenge, the queens were full of questions.

Naturally, The Devil Wears Prada, a favorite of anyone with taste, came up in their conversation. Hathaway revealed a secret about the hit 2006 film’s casting process: “I will give you some tea: I was the ninth choice for Devil Wears Prada. But I got it! Hang in there; never give up.”

You heard that right: Hathaway was from being the first choice to play Andy Sachs (a role she absolutely nailed!). If that story doesn’t inspire you to never stop pursuing your dreams, then listen again, because it’s an inspiring story.

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Hathaway was 23 years old when the The Devil Wears Prada premiered in theaters. During an interview with the co-hosts of the The View that summer, Meryl Streep (the iconic Miranda Priestly) shared the advice she gave Hathaway after she was cast as Andy.

“I said, ‘Don’t lose weight, A’—because they were all telling her to,” she said. “Remember,” she said, turning to Hathaway on the couch next to her, “you came to my house, and you looked so beautiful…”

“And you told me to eat a hamburger,” Hathaway responded.

“Did they tell you to lose weight, too?,” co-host Joy Behar asked Streep.

“They wouldn’t dare,” Streep replied.

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Ahead of her Drag Race appearance, the Oscar winner revealed the text exchange between her and her mom, who’s a big fan of Ru.

“A text exchange with my Mom (who has ‘enormous respect’ @rupaulofficial) 💕,” she wrote. “I couldn’t be more excited to be zooming into the work room on @rupaulsdragrace tonight! Huge love and thanks to the the crew that made it happen!
Love,
Annie Hathaslay”

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Anne Hathaslay…I’m almost mad I didn’t come up with that before she did.

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Megan Thee Stallion has a new boyfriend. The musician confirmed in an Instagram Live on Friday that she is dating rapper Pardison “Pardi” Fontaine.

She confirmed the relationship after bringing up Fontaine’s online critics.

“I didn’t like what they was trying to say about Pardi,” Megan told her fans, before sharing their relationship status. “‘Cause he is so calm and so sweet and very protective…That’s my boo and I really like him.” Later, she officially confirmed the relationship: “I never said hot girl can never have a boyfriend, adding,”Yeah, he my boyfriend.”

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On Friday, Fontaine shared some details of his Valentine’s Day with Megan Thee Stallion. Their day appeared to include a personalized meal with a menu that reads, “Pardy with a Hottie.”

The two appeared to take a private plane, decked out with Valentine’s Day roses, to their special lunch date.

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In the past, Megan has spoken about how she’s had to change her life since rising to stardom. One of those major changes? Keeping her personal life private. “You got to be careful what you’re doing in public because sometimes people spin it like it’s something else,” she told The Rolling Stone in February of 2020.

In that feature, the magazine noted the velocity with which rumors about Megan’s dating life spread: “If she’s photographed next to a man — whether it’s Daniel Kaluuya at the BET Hip Hop Awards or Trey Songz at a club — it quickly becomes an all-consuming story about who she’s dating that’s rarely rooted in fact. During the first week of February, Megan caught the ire of the internet after G-Eazy posted an Instagram story featuring him kissing her on the face. In true Megan fashion, she’d joke a day later that the Bay Area rapper just liked the taste of Fenty makeup, while denouncing any rumors.”

Megan’s actually confirmed she has a boyfriend now. Who is Pardison Fontaine?

His full name is Jordyn Kyle Lanier Thorpe

Just as Megan Thee Stallion’s real name is not Megan Thee Stallion, Pardison Fontaine’s rapper name is not the name he was given at birth. The 31-year-old Capricorn is from Newburgh, New York.

He reportedly has a 4-year-old daughter, Jordy Jr., who was born in 2016.

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His stage name is inspired by the 1985 film Back to the Future

In a November 2019 interview with People, Fontaine said he initially called himself “Pardi McFly,” a spin on the character Marty McFly, played by Michael J. Fox.

“Then, I thought to myself, ‘JAY-Z is not going to do a song with somebody named Pardi McFly,’ he said. “So, I just dropped the McFly and I kept the Pardi.”

His rapping career dates back to middle school

Fontaine told People that he wrote a song with another student-rapper.

“He gave me this beat and I wrote a little verse to it and that was the first time I ever rapped,” Pardi said. “That was like, ‘All right, I can do this.’ That was my real intro.”

Pardi released his biggest hit in 2018, but he’s behind a lot of popular music

In 2019, The New Yorker profiled Pardi as part of its feature on ghostwriters in the music industry. Writer Carrie Battan noted that when Cardi B released her debut album, Invasion of Privacy, in 2018, she did thanked her ghostwriter for the song “Be Careful,” which is an unusual move in the industry. The ghostwriter in question was Pardi.

“My boy Pardison . . . I told him, ‘I really want this record. I want it for me,’ “Cardi told hip-hop radio host Ebro Darden. Fontaine’s also behind Kanye West’s “Violent Crimes” (2018) and Ed Sheeran’s “South of the Border” (2019).

In 2018, though, Fontaine began to make a name for himself (under his own name) with his album, UNDER8ED.

Now, add boyfriend of “WAP” Queen Megan Thee Stallion to his résumé.

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Selena Gomez might have spent her quarantine days making gourmet dishes look easy on Selena + Chef, but now she’s (safely) back at work out in the world, filming a comedy series with Steve Martin and Martin Short. On Saturday, she was seen wearing a big furry orange coat, a black turtleneck sweater, a gray mask, white hot-top boots, and hoop earrings.

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Here she is getting cozy on set:

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Gomez has been in the city for the past few weeks filming the new show, which currently doesn’t have an airdate. In an interview with The Daily Beast last August, Short described the show by saying “it’s about three people who live in one of those upscale apartment buildings in New York. They see each on the elevator, they kind of nod, but they never really speak. They don’t even know each other’s names. And then you find out that each one of them goes to their individual apartments and just turns on true crime and obsesses. And then one time they’re in the elevator with this fourth person. And they find out that fourth person is killed and they’re determined to solve it. But they make a pact: only murders in the building will they solve. Because they can’t be bothered to go outside.”

Gomez first spoke out about the project around the same time, when Martin confirmed on Twitter that the actress would be joining the cast.

“Sooo exciting to work with the legends themselves,” she wrote.

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Gomez herself is a true-crime fan IRL, so she’s probably having a blast filming this show (and looking incredible while she’s at it).

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Like so many of us watching the world burn, writer-director Rose Glass has wrestled with her faith. She grew up attending Catholic schools in the U.K. and has vicars in her family, so the thought of questioning her Christianity stayed dormant for years. But now, on the cusp of her unsettling debut film, Saint Maud, she reflects on what she didn’t articulate back then: “It’s like, who’s calling me?”

Enter the titular Maud, née Katie (Morfydd Clark), a reclusive hospice worker who’s recently reinvented her life and devoted herself to God following the shocking death of a man under her care. She turns her attention to a new patient, Amanda (Jennifer Ehle), an American dancer dying from stage four lymphoma, and becomes terrifyingly obsessed with not only providing Amanda emotional support, but saving her hedonistic soul.

While Glass says she has “quite a healthy relationship” with her faith these days, she admits that making Saint Maud stirred up residual feelings she channeled into her protagonist. “Some of the stuff you only realize in hindsight, after you’ve made it,” she says of the filmmaking process. Using the heightened landscape of the horror genre to explore how far a “very zealous, religious character” can go, the filmmaker also examines resonating themes of isolation, shame, and unbridled fear that Maud feels—and projects—as a woman of faith. As Saint Maud spirals toward a petrifying finish, it makes you speculate, as Glass has, what the true path to salvation really is. “It’s dangerous to constantly be seeking external validation instead of just being happy with yourself,” the director ultimately concludes.

Here, the filmmaker discusses forging her own relationship with religion, using horror to examine grave themes “dressed up in fun,” and the personal woes that plague both the faithful and the faithless.

Is the story of Saint Maud a personal one in that it deals with a crisis of faith?

Not in an autobiographical sense. It didn’t stem from a crisis of faith I’d had in particular. It’s all fairly abstract connections. You always end up filtering whatever weird personal stuff you’ve got going on into it somehow, but I think I sort of hid away from [that]. It’s a character that I resonate with, I guess.

What were some of those things you might have filtered into the film?

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The religion stuff, because Christianity was so familiar to me growing up. It was quite a big presence, but it was never rammed down my throat. I just didn’t question it a lot growing up, as probably a lot of people don’t, and then got interested in it from a slightly more outsider perspective later on. I feel like I’ve got quite a healthy relationship with Christianity in that it’s not too close.

I was also raised Christian and experienced questions of faith, particularly how a lack of faith can have grave consequences. Saint Maud reflects a quite violent form of punishment for those whose faith is wavering. Maud punishes herself, then her heathen employer.

Well, I guess in Christianity, almost the worst thing you can do is not believe. But the whole thing of faith is believing in something without evidence, which I’ve struggled with. I was interested in the role faith could play in someone’s life, even someone who objectively says, “I’m not a particularly spiritual or religious person.” But weirdly, through the process of making this film and writing this story, I was tapping into feelings and thoughts within myself, which maybe are the same things somebody who does have faith or is going through a crisis like Maud might.

The violence, and the sort of flagellation stuff, all that’s kind of quite neatly baked into a lot of Christian history. Well, not even just Christian—probably a lot of forms of organized religion: pain and penance and suffering as a way to godliness. That fed into Maud’s own sense of self-loathing and guilt and shame pretty neatly.

It’s why I’ve always thought horror was an apt genre to discuss these questions of faith. Did you always know it would be a horror movie?

In the beginning, I didn’t. I’m not too fussed about the genre question anymore. We had a lot of discussions about that whilst developing it, but I don’t think I consciously thought of it as a horror film. But I always knew that it would be heightened and stylized and not super naturalistic, or maybe even realistic. One of my producers, when he first read the treatment I put together, said, “Oh, this feels like a horror film.” I kind of went, “Okay.” [It] didn’t change how I was thinking about it too much. Maybe he encouraged me to lean into some of those elements a bit more. For me, it’s not necessary specifically horror. I like stories where you can hide more subtle things in something dressed up in fun. In horror, you’ve got a big toolkit to play with the fun elements, and [it] lends itself well to visually experimenting and surrealism. You can mask what you’re saying more; it’s just a fun silly ride we’re all going through.

Your decision to make Maud a nurse is so intriguing because nurses and pious people are both revered as healers. Can you talk about that?

I knew I wanted this very zealous, religious character in a contemporary setting. It’s a glib way of saying, I guess, that the closest profession I could think of akin to a saintly figure in a contemporary setting was nurses and medical staff. It made sense to me that Maud would be drawn to that profession. Also, because she’s somebody who’s always found it very difficult to connect with people emotionally and socially, bodies seem less ambiguous to her. Physically caring for somebody is like, “I know how to do this. Bodies work a certain way. I can do it.” It’s the more emotional, psychological stuff that she struggles with.

It seems like Maud’s inability to connect with people is almost intentional, a way of shutting herself off from people and her former life. She certainly does that with her former colleague.

Oh, definitely. Some of my favorite scenes are her trying to chat to normal people. I figured since finding God and taking on the name Maud, she’s becoming a happy person. Her faith in this new identity she’s kind of created for herself helps her keep herself together and feel a bit better than everyone else. Sort of, I don’t need you guys anyway. Which I find hilarious in some scenes and very sad in others.

To Maud, Amanda is quite exotic in the context of the country she’s living in. Suddenly there’s this sort of cool, mysterious, slightly famous artsy type who seems to be interested in her, who seems interested in the fact that she has faith rather than taking the piss out of her—which I imagine is probably what she gets most of the time. There are moments later in the film where we get a glimpse into what she was like before she found God, when she goes out to the pub and stuff. You get to see how she struggled before, that awful feeling of trying to be casual and meet new people and connect, and it just being this torturous, torturous experience. I’m sure a lot of people can relate to [it] on some level.

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After being unable to connect with people in that bar scene, she goes home with a guy—and he rapes her. Why did you decide to include that scene, which also includes a callback to Maud’s medical mishap?

I guess it’s a strange scene to talk about. It starts off as a sex scene and then she has this quite traumatic flashback. After that, it’s a rape scene. And I think the switch…sometimes gets missed. Even some people who were working on the film, [when I] mentioned the rape scene, they’re like, “The what scene?” That whole night and the scenes leading up to that moment, the intention at that point [is that] she’s had her holy mission to save Amanda pulled out from under her feet. It felt like a smack in the face for all the hard work she’s been trying to do. She gets nothing for it. She’s back to square one.

In my head, that’s her sort of Jesus-wandering-the-desert-wilderness and questioning her faith phase. Like, “Fuck you, God.” For me, it was important for people to realize what her life is like without faith and behind this strange veneer she’s created for herself. It’s someone who’s flailing and in desperate need of interaction and communication and support but doesn’t know how to go about asking for it and ends up slipping back into self-destructive patterns.

With the rape scene particularly, I know that’s a trope in some rape-revenge things, of the woman [who] has to be raped before she can be empowered. I felt like it was important to show the danger she’s in, the state of mind she’s in, and have that lack of awareness of her situation. She doesn’t have the ability just to make it. She tries, he ignores her, so there’s nothing more she can do there. It shows how vulnerable she is, how easy it is for stuff like that to happen. Me and Morfydd talked about it. In my head it’s probably not the first time something like that might have happened to her, and I don’t think even in Maud’s head she would consciously consider what happens in that scene a rape. It was an important element of that scene. But I didn’t want it to be, “This happens and then that’s the trigger for everything that happens next.” Because it’s not. It’s part of it, but not everything.

When God finally speaks in the film, He sounds demonic. I thought for a moment that He might actually be the devil and killing Amanda is how Maud becomes sanctified in His eyes. Is it possible the only devil is the one she’s worshipping?

Possibly. I mean, maybe this helps: that’s Morfydd’s voice that we just sort of pitched down.

Oh!

It’s got to be Welsh because Morfydd is Welsh. That scene wasn’t originally in the shooting script going in—I sort of wrote it during the edit and added it in because it felt that there was a bit missing and we needed God to give her a final push. So, I was like, okay, God has to appear and speak. We decided it would be the cockroach. Then I’d listened to Morfydd speaking Welsh on the phone to her sister during the shoot, so I got a bit more familiar with how it sounded and was like, “Ah, lovely, mysterious language no one will recognize.” Which is great. So, it’s her—to me, anyway. Obviously, people won’t know that watching the film unless they’re told. But I do like that it could go either way. I welcome any and all interpretations. [Chuckles]

Yeah, I don’t know what I’m bringing to it. But that’s how I saw it.

We wanted everything to be from a very objective outsider point of view. Yes, probably a lot of what happens in the film on a literal level is a result of psychosis and delusions. But the experience Maud’s going through, even if that’s just sort of the scientific explanation for it, doesn’t give you much insight into what she’s actually experiencing and why she’s doing stuff. So, yes, she could have been accidentally led down the path by a dark force, because obviously, the God most Christians pray to probably wouldn’t tell her to kill Amanda.

Exactly. That brings me to Saint Maud’s final scene, the fiery crucifixion. Is her descent inevitable? Could she ever truly have been saved?

Yes, absolutely. That was sort of too little, too late by that point. But that was the idea with the nurse, Joy, coming to her bedsit towards the end to check on her. Maud tries phoning her early in the film and for whatever reason, that person couldn’t talk, so she checks in a bit later, but by that point, Maud’s already put her guard up again. The one time she does reach out for help—during that night before she goes home with the bloke and gets raped—she does reach out to the friend and [is] rebuffed. But I think, even if just that night, somebody had sat down and had a proper chat with her and she’d actually let down her guard and let them know what’s going on, I think things could work out a lot differently.

Saint Maud

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It could literally be the difference of a conversation—getting somebody to realize the situation they’re actually in. Sometimes, when you’re so far gone in your own head, it all happens very, very incrementally and gradually, and you don’t realize it’s happening until someone else points it out. She’s obviously pushed it to an awful extreme. But I still feel the intention was that everything she does is motivated by quite universal stuff: the constant thing of striving to be good and perfect and good at what you do, and feel validated and like you have a purpose for being here—that you contribute something, that people notice and respect you. It doesn’t necessarily have to have anything to do with religion or flagellation stuff. Obviously, that’s where a lot of these things get channeled.

Human beings, I think, are quite good at punishing ourselves and thinking, Oh, if I just do this, if I just do that, I’ll make it better next time. It’s dangerous to constantly be seeking external validation instead of ultimately just being happy with yourself—which is obviously easier said than done. In Maud’s case, it’s done in a deliberately provocative way, but I think even in much smaller examples, succumbing too totally to any external force or power is quite dangerous.

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I do not know this man. I think I recognize him, but WandaVision, Marvel Studios’s ambitious new series on Disney+, has me doubting even that.

In my prime, I was scooping up comic books every Wednesday afternoon at my hole-in-the-wall downtown comic-book shop, and a good number of my favorite series featured a young—or old, depending on the universe—man imbued with super-strength and a haughty personality. His name was Pietro Maximoff, otherwise known as Quicksilver. He was, ostensibly, the brother of Wanda Maximoff, the so-called Scarlet Witch and protagonist of the aforementioned WandaVision. I felt a kinship with this character’s terrible choice in hairstyles. Beyond that, I didn’t know or care much about him.

But then word got out that he’d be appearing in Avengers: Age of Ultron, and I re-invested myself. At this point in my young adulthood, I’d guzzled the Marvel Kool-Aid and was regularly scrolling Tumblr for trailer drops, theories, and spoilers in between classes. I think I actually cried when he died in the film, though, admittedly, I cried a lot in those days. Regardless, Aaron-Taylor Johnson as Pietro had my attention.

But then there was this other Pietro. Evan Peters first showed up as “Peter” in X-Men: Days of Future Past and briefly captured Tumblr’s attention with his “Time in a Bottle” scene, in which he moved so quickly time seemed to freeze around him. Everyone knew this “Peter” was actually Pietro/Quicksilver, or at least some franchise-ified version of him.

But here’s the catch: These two actors played the same character and a completely different character. Aaron-Pietro was a full-grown man who was born in Sokovia, lived in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and died while fighting Ultron. Evan-Pietro was a kid who messed around with mutants and ate Twinkies, all within the X-Men Cinematic Universe. They have no real relation to each other besides a name and a superpower.

Now, flash forward to WandaVision, and—wonder of wonders—the once-thought-dead Pietro shows up on his sister’s doorstep, landing smack in the middle of her sitcom world right before everything goes to shit. But this is Evan-Pietro. To Wanda’s eyes, he looks off: she remembers growing up with Aaron-Pietro instead. Darcy Lewis—an astrophysicist from the Thor movies whom S.W.O.R.D taps to assess Wanda’s Westview-hijacking—claims Wanda “recast Pietro.” But Wanda has no memory of doing that. She’s as mystified by Pietro’s presence in Westview as he is.

So, somebody tell me…who is this man?

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Let’s go through a few theories.

Theory #1: This Pietro has been plucked from an alternate universe.

Disney owns both the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the X-Men films, which were created in partnership between Marvel Entertainment and 20th Century Fox. So, it’s altogether possible that the so-called X-Men Cinematic Universe could collide with the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Thus it’s possible that the Pietro who arrives in Westview is, indeed, Evan-Pietro, and that he arrived off the set of X-Men: Dark Phoenix. This seems unlikely, because WandaVision‘s Pietro has memories that align with the Aaron-Pietro.

In WandaVision, Pietro tells his sister he remembers getting shot. (That never happens in X-Men.) He remembers going trick-or-treating in Sokovia. (That also never happens in X-Men.) So if he’s truly a mutant, how can he have those memories? It doesn’t add up, unless someone else is manipulating his mind…

Theory #2: This Pietro is not a Pietro at all.

I’ll admit it’s been a few years since I spent literally all my free time reading Marvel fan boards, but I’m not so rusty I can’t sniff out a good theory. This is the one I think has legs: The Pietro who arrives in Westview is not actually Pietro.

We have a few reasons to believe this. One, he doesn’t have the right face. Two, he’s far too cavalier about the whole “my-sister-is-creating-her-own-sitcom-world” thing. Three, at the end of WandaVision episode 7, we see a mid-credits scene in which he catches Monica Rambeau lurking around the back of Agatha Harkness’s house. When he surprises her, he quips, “Snoopers gonna snoop.”

Unless he’s just trying to terrify Monica for gags, he must be protecting Agatha’s property, and if that’s the case, then he’s on her side. The, uh, evil side.

Which means he’s likely a creation of Agatha herself. Remember that, at the end of episode 7, Agatha reveals herself as a witch. If Wanda Maximoff has the power to reincarnate Vision, maybe Agatha can recreate her own version of Pietro.

Another reason I love this theory? A product drop seems to confirm it. (Marvel has a serious habit of shooting itself in the foot when it comes to products and spoilers. Gotta get that merch money!) Funko Pop—you know, those weird balloon-headed bobblehead things—recently revealed their figure for WandaVision‘s Pietro, and his title on the box reads “Pietro Maximoff.” Notice the quotations.

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Why would there be quotations around his name, unless that’s not really his name? None of the other Funko Pop boxes have them. You see what I’m implying. Food for thought.

Theory #3: Pietro is actually Mephisto. Or Loki.

WandaVision fans have an ardent fascination with Mephisto, the Marvel villain based on the Mephistopheles of German legend. The simplest way to explain him is, well, he’s a demon with a lot of power. Let’s leave it at that for now.

He’s also capable of shape-shifting. Some fans believe Agatha is trying to summon or revive him in her strange little Basement of Terror. Others think she’s already done so, and he took the form of Pietro to keep from rousing Wanda’s suspicions.

Still others believe this Pietro is Loki in disguise, and that Loki’s presence in the show would tie the series to the upcoming Loki series, as well as to upcoming films including Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and Spider-Man 3. I appreciate this theory because it correctly assumes Marvel is willing to make enormous logical stretches work in order to preserve its money-making machine—an unstoppable wheel of sequels and spin-offs and reboots. And it’s possible Tom Hiddleston is the mystery actor Paul Bettany, who plays Vision, mentioned in several interviews.

But putting Loki and Agatha in the same room would feel odd, because Loki is by far the more established (and beloved) villain. He would usurp her immediately. Why bring Agatha (and the inimitable Kathryn Hahn) into the limelight, only to crush her star power by bringing in the one villain Marvel fans love to make excuses for?

Still, it’s possible Loki is just that crafty. For now, I do not trust this Pietro—and will not until he reveals his true face.

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