(Warning: This post contains spoilers for “The Haunting of Hill House” Season 1.)
Glove-clad Theo (Kate Siegel) may be the one with the flashy psychic ability on Netflix’s “The Haunting of Hill House,” but she isn’t the only Crain child in touch with the other side.
Though you may have only seen a couple scenes featuring Shirley’s (Elizabeth Reaser) foreboding sleep talking — which resulted in a spot on prediction about Nellie and the Red Room — Reaser told TheWrap she thinks those moments indicate the family’s eldest daughter was gifted like her sister.
And the reason we probably didn’t learn more about her psychic connection was Shirley’s refusal to embrace anything that might keep her from feeling normal.
In the interview above, Reaser tells TheWrap Shirley’s sleep talking “was such a cool thing that went largely unexplored in the story — even in the beginning.
“In the pilot, they talk about [how] young Shirley is saying stuff in her sleep, and then it sort of cuts to me waking up in the middle of the night saying, ‘Nellie’s in the red room,’” she said.
Reaser says that “indicated to me that her unconscious was tapped into something that her conscious mind was not.”
“That something in that house had gotten inside her or that she was able to know things that her conscious mind wouldn’t know,” she continued. “But because Shirley is so sort of cut off from anything outside of the here and now — I mean, Shirley is basically just running for her life at all times. She’s one of those people that just wants so desperately to be normal and doesn’t want to consider anything outside of what’s pragmatic or real. And so her unconscious is picking up on all these things, but it’s not integrated into her conscious mind, so she really can’t use any of it to her advantage the way that Theo can. (laughs)”
Watch the full interview above.
“The Haunting of Hill House” Season 1 is available for streaming now on Netflix.