Bestselling novel The Housemaid is coming to life on screen — but don’t expect an exact retelling of what happened on the page.
The twisty thriller follows Millie (played by Sydney Sweeney), a young woman with a troubled past who is hired as a live-in housemaid for a wealthy couple, Nina (Amanda Seyfried) and Andrew Winchester (Brandon Sklenar), as it’s quickly revealed that things aren’t as perfect as they seem.
At the Los Angeles premiere on Monday, director Paul Feig told The Hollywood Reporter how he loves getting to “screw with the audience, in a fun way” with the story and applauded studio Lionsgate for having “really guarded the secrets” of what’s to come in the movie’s trailer and marketing.
“It’s weird though because the book is out; all you have to do is go to the bookstore and you know the twist,” he continued, while also revealing, “but we added a new ending, so the people who love the book you get more.” Of that decision to switch up that ending, Feig added, “There’s things that work in the book that are really satisfying, but on the big screen you always want more. No spoilers, but there are relationships I wanted to have a final button on and so we were able to do that.”
The decision of how closely to mirror the book were also a big conversation with the cast, as Sweeney explained, “I’m a huge book lover and I read books religiously, so whenever I see a book adaptations on film, you compare. So there were different things that of course we wanted to take from the book and then there were different aspects that Paul wanted to change, like he didn’t want to have an accent for the [Millie] character; little tweaks here and there. But everything else I wanted to really stay true to the book.”
Sklenar noted that for his character, “I wanted to obviously do it justice, but I also wanted to turn certain elements up to 11 and kind of surprise people and give them something they may not expect, even if they had read the book.”
The Housemaid is the first novel in a trilogy, with Feig acknowledging that “if people show up and see it, I would love to see what Millie does next” in adapting the next two books as well. The film’s success will likely come from the dynamic between Sweeney and Seyfried, who grew close while letting loose together on screen.
“What’s really beautiful about working with Amanda is she has a very similar process as I do, so we both jump in and out of scenes. We can have a conversation going and then they call, ‘action’ and we jump into it, and then they call, ‘cut’ and we just resume that conversation that we were having,” Sweeney said. “It’s really fun working with somebody like that, and it’s rare; I haven’t really come across that that often.”
Seyfried echoed, “We both understand the parameters and we know what we’re doing in terms of our characters and we love this project and we love Paul so it’s like, I felt completely free to go as far as I needed to when I was Nina. I’m very grateful for that… it’s not rare to find a co-star like that, but it’s not always certain. I think it’s why you really earn what happens.”
The Housemaid hits theaters on Friday.
