Dolly’s faith asks the question, where is the line between faith and blindness? For yourself, where was that line?
I had to try and find where that line is and where is that line for her? I think the problem that we encounter for Dolly early on is that what she wants more than anything in the world is for her family to be okay. She wants her daughter to walk again. There’s this immense amount of weight upon Dolly when we meet her where she feels hopeless and her faith has brought her through that. I think if she didn’t have her faith, she probably would’ve collapsed. She probably would’ve imploded upon herself with the emotions and the weight of it all, this awful thing that’s happened to her family.
When we meet her, she needs a miracle and a miracle happens. I think you take someone who has a tremendous amount of faith — and a lot of people do, and it’s a positive thing that saves them — but then you inject this extra thing into it and suddenly, I will follow, right?
She very early on gets sort of sucked into this thing that I don’t think she could see the negative side of it if she tried, because there are too many positives that align closely with the goals that she set and it all sort of pays dividends for her. Her daughter walks again, she and her husband feel better, she walks a little straighter, her community comes alive. All these things that Dolly wants she gets.
It’s really only in those final moments of episode 7 or maybe in episode 6, where she starts to go, “Wait a minute, something is wrong,” that everything shatters. It’s sad that it takes as long as it does for the blinders to be removed, but I had to find a way to let her trust in everything that was happening and trust Father Paul, and trust Wade, and trust the journey that we were all going on as a group. It was an adventure for me as an actor to just go, “Okay, Dolly’s just a hundred percent in.”
Even towards the end, it’s almost hard to feel anger towards her because of those reasons you listed. It’s conflicting.
Yeah. I mean, some of the people in the town are immediately identified as “the villains,” like Bev Keane — beautifully played by Sam Sloyan, who is an incredible human being. It’s ironic that she’s playing this master villain. We’ve become quite close friends.
The Bev Keanes of the community are clearly marked out as those are the people who you need to be afraid of to some extent, but Dolly is this person who’s your everyday faithful, loving community member who just wants good things. It is difficult to blame Dolly, even though Dolly takes quite a pivotal role later on in the episodes as things start to unravel.
My partner when we watched it, because I didn’t tell him anything about the show, he was shocked when he saw me take the role I played in it. I’m handing out the cups and he had to pause and go, “Wait a minute. You’re involved?” And I’m like, “Yeah, because she believes.” It’s that cult mentality. It’s that thing that you said that earlier, where is the line? Where does the faith go too far? That’s what’s so great about the script is because it isn’t really a monster story. It’s got nothing to do with that. It’s all about where are our moral compasses, and where are the lines and what lines are we willing to cross and who is to say what’s too far?
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