NEW YORK, Oct. 2 (UPI) — The Madison actress Elle Chapman says she wasn’t a huge fan of creepy movies and TV shows before working on writer-producer Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story: 13.
“I’m such a little scaredy cat and, growing up, I never watched American Horror Story, but my sister is the biggest AHS fan and, so, I remember so much of my childhood walking into her room and she’s watching something terrifying and then I run out. So, to find myself inside an episode is so surreal,” Chapman, 27, told UPI in a phone interview this week.
“It was so exciting to even just call my sister and tell her when I booked this because she doesn’t watch much TV [now]. So, usually, when I tell her, ‘Oh, I’m doing this,’ she’s like, ‘I have no idea what that is,'” Chapman said.
“It was pretty fun to be able to tell her that I’m joining her favorite TV show,” she added. “That was really the expectation I had going in. I was like: ‘I’m going to be terrified. How am I going to get through this?’ And it turns out when you’re working on it, it’s a lot less scary.”
Chapman had such a positive experience on the show that she went home and binged a bunch of others.
“It 100 percent changed my feelings about it because, basically, after we finished filming, I was like, ‘OK, I’m in my 20s. I think I can watch American Horror Story and not be scared,'” she said.
“So, I went back and I watched [previous AHS season] Murder House. I watched Coven. I watched Asylum. I watched Hotel and I watched Apocalypse,” Chapman added.
“I completely fell in love with it. I’m like, ‘I can’t believe I got to join this franchise in this world.’ It is so much fun,” she said. “There’s so many layers to it.”
Airing Thursdays on FX and Hulu, AHS: 13 casts Chapman as Ashley, a young woman with a phobia of the number 13 who is one of the few survivors of a deadly commercial airplane crash.
The only other person she knows who makes it through the ordeal is her frenemy Kira’s new boyfriend, kind-hearted hospice worker Ben (Joey Pollari), who is also frozen with fear when confronted with the number that follows 12.
As the pair connect over their shared experience and conflicted feelings about Kira, Ashley reveals that the plane crash wasn’t the first time she defied death.
She was also at a backyard family wedding during the COVID-19 pandemic when a serial killer with a pig’s head and a huge hook started slaughtering the guests.
In the end, 13 were dead, but Ashley got away.
Filming that scene was hands down more challenging than shooting that plane crash, according to Chapman.
“The head of special effects is so good at his job and he made that pig head look so real. I could not look at it,” she recalled.
“I genuinely was so freaked out that I don’t really know if I’m acting. They’re like, ‘OK, now we need you to run.’ And I’m like, ‘I’ve got it!'”
Chapman described Ashley as someone who thinks of herself as a survivor, not a victim.
“She’s very confident. She’s funny. She doesn’t really have a filter and, obviously, she’s been through two horrific events,” the actress explained.
“But she processes it through her humor and, then, they discover that they have this strange fear of 13, which creates this immediate bond between them.”
Chapman now considers Pollari one of her best friends and the pair even watched their big episode of the show together.
“We got the screener and we were talking about it afterwards and we’re like, ‘Why are we so nervous to watch it?'” she remembered.
“I was like, ‘That episode is where we became friends.’ Like these characters, Ashley and Ben were getting to know each other and kind of developing this connection, so were Joey and I in real life. And it means so much to me and I’m so happy that it came out the way it did.”
Although Ashley made it off the plane alive, she suffered serious injuries that required extensive skin grafts.
This meant hours in a makeup chair having prosthetics applied to her body, but Chapman said she didn’t mind because she enjoyed spending time with the special effects team.
“They made it so much fun. I genuinely was always going back into their room to try to hang out with them,” she said.
“They do such an incredible job,” she added. “They’re masters of their craft. So, the prosthetics, for me, as an actor, were super-helpful.”
The wardrobe also helped her get into character.
“I’m like: ‘Oh, this is not Elle Chapman. This is Ashley.’ And I think that was a really important part of transforming into her,” the actress said.
The show also stars Sarah Paulson, Jessica Lange, Evan Peters and Paul Anthony Kelly.
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