(Warning: This post contains spoilers for Episode 6 of “American Horror Stories,” titled “Feral.”)
Cody Fern is among the “American Horror Story” vets that star in an episode of the first season of Ryan Murphy’s spinoff anthology, “American Horror Stories.” As an actor who has experienced playing multiple twisted characters crafted by Murphy, Fern now has enough horrific on-screen deaths under his belt to decide which is truly terrifying and which is actually amusing.
Spoiler alert: Fern finds the death of the anti-Christ Michael Langdon, his character from “American Horror Story” Season 8, “Apocalypse,” to be the most tragic, and the death of his “American Horror Stories” park ranger, Stan, to be “fun.”
“They’re so technical when they happen. I mean, Michael Langdon’s death was really hard for me. I really loved Michael Langdon,” Fern told TheWrap of his “Apocalypse” character, who was run over by a car driven by Billie Lourd’s character in order to save the world, of course. “So it was difficult to put him in that scenario and to kind of have to go through that and how surreptitiously he died, you know what I mean? So Michael Langdon’s death was hard on me. Stan’s was not (laughs). It was fun. It felt like it was going to be fun. And then how people would respond to it, it felt like it was going to be fun, as well.”
OK, having your innards ripped out by humanoid beasts called “ferals,” the central baddies of Thursday’s “American Horror Stories,” aptly titled “Feral,” might not be fun in the moment — but it does look pretty entertaining on screen.
As for the scenes preceding Stan’s death, Fern says he’s heard some “AHS” fans are mocking the character’s Australian accent on social media. Now, that he finds even funnier than Stan’s death, given that Fern is, well, Australian, but has not previously used his Australian accent for the franchise.
“I don’t like acting in my Australian accent. I very much prefer acting in an American accent,” Fern said. “It’s funny, because like everybody in the ‘Horror Story’ fandom, there are people who are so passionate and so everybody really wants to give you feedback about, like, how good or how bad you were or how they would have done it. Which is always hysterical to me. They always open with something like, ‘You played Michael Langdon really well — except this. I would have done this.’ And I have found it funny because there has been some — I don’t have Twitter, so I’m kind of not in that world — but somebody from the production has been filtering me some of the hilarious, I guess, tweets about how people are saying, like, ‘Cody Fern can’t do an Australian accent for s—. He should just stick to his bland, plain American accent,’ like, ‘Cody Fern trying to do an Australian accent is so bad.’ I’m like, ‘Y’all don’t know that I have an Australian accent, right? Like, it’s actually my voice.’ So that’s been funny to me.”
Fern says he also prefers to use an American accent while acting because it helps him in “immersing” himself in a character.
“It was a risk to act in an Australian accent, but it ended up being one that really paid off. And it was something that instantly set Stan aside as an outsider. We didn’t have to work hard to make him an outsider. He’s an outsider based on where he’s from. So he’s instantly at odds with these people,” he explained. “And also, it’s kind of the horror trope, right? It’s like the outsider from another country or from another land or far away. And so it was fun to play with that trope, as well.”
The Season 1 finale of “American Horror Stories,” which was renewed for Season 2 on Friday, launches next Thursday on FX on Hulu.