At the Toronto International Film Festival this week, Summer H. Howell sat down with IMDb to talk about landing the most scrutinized horror role of the year, while Mike Flanagan revealed how he pitched Stephen King a radically different version of Carrie to win the author’s blessing.
Howell, 22, is stepping into a part Sissy Spacek made iconic in 1976, and she is doing it without ever having seen Spacek’s performance. She told Entertainment Weekly she had not watched the original film or read King’s 1974 novel before she was cast, and when she asked Flanagan whether she should do her homework, they agreed she would build her own Carrie from scratch.
“I didn’t know about the telekinesis or the bullying or anything,” she said. “It was just a new story to me. It is for a lot of people my age. So it was just about connecting with the words on the page, how she feels. A big part of my Carrie is that she’s open and curious about the world and wants to experience things.”
The road to the role was its own story. Howell told USA Today she started getting déjà vu during the audition process and began telling family and friends something was coming. Before the final hour-long call, in which she performed four scenes, she lay on her bedroom floor repeating affirmations about why she deserved the part. Then Flanagan offered her the role on April Fools’ Day. She beat out 1,800 candidates, a figure Flanagan shared with The Hollywood Reporter, and the showrunner says her take is “unlike anything that anyone’s ever done with the part before.”
Flanagan has described Howell’s Carrie as “wide open,” “eager,” “curious” and “earnest,” a young woman walking into her teenage years with an innate trust in people and in goodness. It is a deliberate break from every prior version, and it already has one important fan: King himself called the series “brilliant” on Threads, adding that “what it has to say about social media is shocking and true,” per Polygon.
TDN has been tracking the series since Howell was cast in June 2025, through Flanagan’s social media age reimagining, the poster reveal and this week’s first wave of critic reactions.
Carrie runs eight episodes and premieres October 7 on Prime Video.