Samantha Sloyan, who plays Margaret White in Mike Flanagan’s Prime Video Carrie, worried the role would repeat Bev Keane, the religious fanatic she played in Flanagan’s Midnight Mass. Flanagan told her Margaret’s love for Carrie would distinguish the characters.
In the novel and every film, Margaret White is the monster: the mother whose fear and hatred of her own daughter make her as dangerous as the bullies at school. Flanagan’s series, which premiered October 7, 2026, keeps the fanaticism but changes what’s underneath it.
“Margaret White has always been an abuser, defined by the fear and hatred she has for her daughter,” Flanagan said. “In ours, she fiercely loves Carrie and just doesn’t know how to protect her.”
He told The Hollywood Reporter he wanted her “not as a monster, but as a fiercely protective, fiercely loving mother, whose tools are incorrect.”
That reading isn’t entirely new to the role. Julianne Moore, who played Margaret in 2013, said “everything that Margaret does to Carrie is out of her desire to parent her correctly.” Sissy Spacek, the 1976 Carrie, described the same character from her daughter’s side: Carrie “just wants to be normal” and “had this freak of a mother who just destroyed her life.”
Stephen King built Carrie from two girls he grew up around, including a classmate who was “the goat in every class… because she wore the same clothes to school every day.” In On Writing, he admitted, “I never liked Carrie… but through Sondra and Dodie I came at last to understand her a little.”
Summer H. Howell, the new Carrie, puts the whole question of whether her character is victim or villain “somewhere uncomfortably in the middle.”
