I wanted to have a few shades to quite a few shades of her performance in my own just so it felt like our Annie Wilkes could grow into hers.
Even though the situations that she finds herself in are very, very different than anything you would imagine in just watching the film, I wanted to have our Annie feasibly be able to become that Annie in the future.
So it was daunting, for sure.
So there were different shades of how to attack that, and I thought a lot about how, if I was just a viewer of the show, I wasn’t going to be particularly interested in seeing a brand new, completely start-from-scratch version of Annie Wilkes — because what Kathy Bates did was so beloved; it certainly was for me.