Hold Your Breath starring Sarah Paulson (now on Disney+ in Canada, Hulu in the U.S.) is a horror/thriller story set in 1930s Dust Bowl-era Oklahoma. For Paulson’s costar, Tony Award-winner Annaleigh Ashford, it’s the “unusual” combination of a “heartfelt piece of work” in the genre that makes this film stand out.
“I think all great horror films, the great ones, have threads of humanity and heart, and this had both,” Ashford told Yahoo Canada about what excited her about the project. “So I think it’s a really special piece.”
Searchlight Pictures
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In Hold Your Breath Paulson plays Margaret Bellum, a mother raising her daughters Rose (Amiah Miller) and Ollie (Alona Jane Robbins) on their farm, after Margaret’s husband moved away for work. While this seems like the perfect time for Margaret and their daughters to join her husband, as the dust storms take hold, Margaret won’t leave the farm because her third daughter, Ada, was buried on the property after dying from scarlet fever.
Ashford plays Margaret’s sister, Esther, who has three boys. But her youngest is ill, causing great concern, and Esther is also dealing with the trauma of losing her husband.
When Margaret is met with an unknown visitor, Wallace Grady (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), who says he’s a preacher with abilities to heal, we see how his mysterious presence impacts Margaret and her family.
Working with Sarah Paulson is a ‘thrill’
Speaking about collaborating with Paulson, Ashford called her costar, “one of the greatest actors of our generation.”
“It’s always a thrill to get to play with her,” Ashford said. “Having these two female characters have arcs that parallel each other, but in opposite directions, I think was really smart and beautiful writing.”
“Also as an actor, it was really lovely to play a character who finds some light and some hope as the story goes on. Halfway through my journey as a character I give up, which is something kind of unusual to play as an actor. … But playing somebody who’s been redeemed and who can be redeemed was a lovely example of hope, especially for a woman of that era.”
Ashford also highlighted that there are two “extraordinary” narratives that run through this film. One is about human impact on climate change and the other is around mental health discussion.
“When you mess with Mother Earth, she talks back to you,” Ashford said. “The Dust Bowl was an extraordinary climate disaster that was man-made, and most people don’t know about it. So I think that was important because it’s something that we’re navigating as humans right now in the time that we’re living.”
“The other narrative thread that was really beautiful was the conversation around mental health and isolation. It was so applicable to our experience with COVID, and this movie was written right before COVID, and it’s literally called Hold Your Breath.”
‘The land spoke back’
While the film is set in the Dust Bowl-era, the production had its own small dust storm while filming the movie.
“The set that we worked on was a piece of land in the middle of Santa Fe, New Mexico [where] we really created the environment of the Dust Bowl,” Ashford revealed. “So we had to clear that little patch of land and build the house that is in the film.”
“And while we were filming, because we had desecrated the land, the land spoke back, and we had an actual small little dust storm that kept everybody indoors for a couple hours. I wasn’t there that day, but I was getting texts from everybody saying, ‘We’re having a real little dust storm. Can you believe it?’ And it was just such a primal example of the of Mother Earth being like, ‘Don’t do this to us.’ So I really felt the land. I felt the history of the land.”