Disclaimer: This FROM interview has been edited for clarity.
Town doctor Kristi is witness to some of the most gruesome happenings of the mysterious town of MGM+ series FROM. Naturally, my curiosity was piqued when speaking to actress Chloe Vandschoot about filming these scenes, as well as Kristi’s interpersonal drama now that her fiancée Marielle has arrived in the town on a bus full of passengers…
LadyJenevia: The show has played around with the idea that Kristi experienced some non-platonic feelings for Kenny while trapped in this town. To what extent are those feelings still in play now that Kristi’s fiancée is also in the town?
Van Landschoot: Kristi’s focus is definitely on Marielle. I think there’s a lot of adjusting for Marielle to understand and yeah, Kristi’s focus is totally gravitated towards that. Not to mention Marielle’s navigating an absolutely treacherous withdrawal so the focus is quite obvious. Kristi had a moment of vulnerability at the end of season one where she truly wasn’t sure what to do. I don’t even think she knows if it’s non-platonic or not. There’s been no time for this this poor girl to sit with herself and really figure out what is going on for her. She’s constantly being pulled to so many crises that she hasn’t really done that deep reflective work. She’s definitely, I think, in need of a friend but it’s so interesting this season because there’s so much happening in Kristi’s world and so much happening in Kenny’s world and they haven’t had a chance to come together and really talk about what the hell is going on in either of those worlds. I think there’s some being visceral and intrinsic about their dynamic that they’re still even in this hellscape, them navigating their own their own situations, they’re still able to come together and be there for one another when needed and we see that more um towards the end of the season, especially Kenny being there for Kristi during a pretty devastating moment. She hasn’t figured it out. She’s in survival mode.
LadyJenevia: I think everyone is.
Van Landschoot: Yeah.
LadyJenevia: Which brings us to the fact that Kristi is the town doctor so she gets a front row seat to some of the most gruesome things that happen there. Does any part of filming that make you squeamish, and can you offer an insight into the technical process of doing that one scene where you’ve got a girl nailed to a tree by her head?
Van Landschoot: I’m a nurse in real life so a lot of that part of who I am got to play into a lot of Kristi, which is great. I’ve also gotten to have a lot of say in terms of how those things would go in real life. Because I’ve done the real thing, I’m not so squeamish when we’re doing it on camera. I was like, ‘This is fake, so…’ but it can get creepy because once you’re in the scene, everything else kind of melts away and it feels real.
We have an incredible prosthetics department, Patrick Baxter, head and he we basically had Phoebe on a tree and she had this prosthetic piece in her forehead and we called it the unicorn horn because it kind of looked like a unicorn horn. They basically like glued it to her head in some way and then they’d position her her in a way that it looked like it was coming through her head and that’s kind of how they did it. It was pretty crazy.
LadyJenevia: We also see Kristi struggling with the guilt over the role that she feels she played in what happened between Sarah and her brother. As an actor, was that guilt something that you were always playing sort of in the nuances of her behaviour or is it more so something that’s just resurfacing specifically because Sarah has returned?
Van Landschoot: I think it’s a lot of things. I think for Christy it was motivated by a desire to set things straight, to inform Sarah that that’s not what she meant, that that’s not… that wasn’t permission, so yeah, a little bit of guilt but also anger, a lot of anger, like ‘Who the hell do you… you’re coming to my clinic like gaslighting me into something, into saying something.’ You know what I mean? Like that too, like the human side of Kristi being like, ‘Well what the hell? Who the hell do you think you are?’ and kind of wanting to lay into her a bit but also, Kristi being Kristi coming from it in a little bit more of a a doctoral perspective of, this isn’t how things are done but Marielle also catching that Kristi’s manic right now and can’t talk to anybody. That’s what we see. Marielle knows how to navigate Kristi in a way that nobody else in town does. Kristi’s only that level of kind of emotional and with with Marielle, she knows what to do. I think if she were to freak out like that with Kenny, Kenny wouldn’t know what to do so that’s kind of… there’s some nuance in between that.
LadyJenevia: Can you please share about the experience of filming that scene where you are smacking a dead body over and over again? That was just something to behold. You had oozing bile and everything, it was a lot.
Van Landschoot: That was a wild scene to shoot and I was also glad that it existed because I think it was time Kristi had a an explosive moment. There was so much build up to that between Marielle’s withdrawal, navigating that the guilt around that, her fight with Kenny, just her sheer burnout as well, I mean I don’t even think the girl slept yet, like she just dealt with Ellis the other night, saved his life, plus Boyd’s worms, everything, she’s had enough. She’s just hoping that this thing has an answer because she likes to fix things, she likes to have the answers, she likes to be a part of a solution, and then she opens it up and she’s like, ‘I can’t work with this.’ Her doctor brain goes out the window and she’s just totally fuelled by her primal instincts in that moment and by a lot. It’s so interesting because by allowing her to just feel and release, she ends up discovering something so useful. I thought that was such an interesting moment in the writing and in her character as well.
FROM season 2 is available to stream on MGM+.
Watch my interview with FROM cast members Chloe Van Landschoot and Pegah Ghafoori here:
Watch my interview with FROM cast members Ricky He and Avery Konrad here:
Watch my interview with FROM cast member Nathan D. Simmons here:
Watch my interview with Harold Perrineau and other FROM cast members here: