How Elisabeth Moss helped Leigh Whannell turn 'The Invisible Man' into a survivor's story
When writer-director Leigh Whannell was approached to update the horror classic "The Invisible Man," he basically spitballed the entire plot on the spot.
Fresh off the modest success of his low-budget 2018 sci-fi thriller "Upgrade," Whannell found himself in a room with executives from Blumhouse Productions and Universal when "they floated this title to me like, 'What do you think about the Invisible Man?'" he said. "Which was weird to me because it was a bit Mad Libs. I was like, 'Not really sure? Never thought about the Invisible Man too much.'
"But one of the guys in the meeting said, 'Well, what would you do with the character?' And purely to fill the airtime I was like, 'I guess I would probably tell the story from the point of view of a victim, like a woman escaping a relationship.' I sort of vomited out the entire movie."
Whannell conceived of the character as a wealthy scientist (played by Oliver Jackson-Cohen of "The Haunting of Hill House") who is charming and controlling in equal measure. After his girlfriend manages to escape the glass prison they share together, he stages his own suicide just to continue to torment and control her under the cover of invisibility.
In a departure from
