Shirley's Elisabeth Moss and Michael Stuhlbarg on Shirley Jackson and marital compromise

In Shirley, Elisabeth Moss plays a wild-eyed version of legendary author Shirley Jackson, who fans might know best as the brain behind The Haunting Of Hill House and the chilling short story The Lottery. Shirley is a fictionalization of sorts of Jackson’s life, but sets Moss’s character up to conflict with Michael Stuhlbarg as Jackson’s real life husband Stanley Hyman. It also throws Odessa Young and Logan Lerman into the mix as a young couple with both something to prove and life force to burn. It’s a churning kettle of a movie, and one that The A.V. Club dubbed a “fittingly gothic psychodrama.”

In the interview above, we talk to Moss and Stuhlbarg about the film’s relational push-pull, as well as what’s most scary to them about Shirley—a movie that’s about a horror author, but not necessarily meant to frighten.