Mike Flanagan unveiled a new television undertaking with Carrie, diverging in tone and elements from Stephen King’s novel and from the previous cinematic adaptations of the same story. Having chosen a different approach, the showrunner also had to select a Carrie who could visually represent him. The choice fell on Summer H. Howell, but it wasn’t as simple as one might think, and to tell more, it was Mike Flanagan himself who elaborated.
Finding the right Carrie for Mike Flanagan was one of the toughest tasks of his career
Mike Flanagan has engaged in numerous on-screen experiments over the years, and yet he admitted that pinpointing the perfect Carrie for his latest miniseries on Prime Video was perhaps “the most exhausting and difficult casting experience” of his entire career.
The version chosen for the miniseries is still a shy Carrie, bullied and endowed with powers, but she is also very curious and ready to dive into a world she doesn’t know in hopes of learning as much as possible and reclaiming everything that was denied by the family, which has forced her into isolation for years. Carrie appears as a positive girl, always smiling, who loves reading and would like to make friends, but school is a hostile environment and she quickly understands that the world does not always go as one wishes.
Reflecting on the casting phase to choose the right Carrie, Mike Flanagan told SlashFilm that he watched more than 1,400 actresses before finding the right one: “What we were looking for was a Carrie like we had never seen before. We were seeking someone curious, sincere, kind, enthusiastic and completely untainted by our world and society, but we also wanted her not to appear naive. Her naivety, if any, came from the fact that she wasn’t informed, that she wasn’t given the context for what was happening around her, but she possessed enormous emotional intelligence, intuitive kindness and a hidden reserve of power inherent in her personality.”
Summer H. Howell embodied all of his requests: “She captured this aspect in a way that left us both astonished by the complexity of her character, yet determined to shield her from the world.” According to the showrunner, the interpretation Summer H. Howell gave to her Carrie “defined the TV series.”
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