Speak No Evil director reveals why he gave James McAvoy’s “toxic” antagonist a tragic backstory: “If they’re just mustache-twirling villains, it’s boring”

Exclusive: Here’s why James Watkins' new take on Christian Tafdrup’s cold chiller fleshes out baddies Paddy and Ciara

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Warning! This article contains spoilers for Speak No Evil. If you’ve yet to see the film, and don’t want to know anything that happens, turn back now!

“Because you let us,” James McAvoy’s Paddy Feld coldly tells Scoot McNairy and Mackenzie Davis’s helpless Ben and Louise, when they ask why he’s torturing them in horror rebootSpeak No Evil. It’s a line that nods to the original but also can’t help invoking The Strangers, the 2008 slasher that proved baddies don’t need to have identities or motivations.

True, Paddy and his wife Ciara (Aisling Franciosi) don’t really have the latter; Ben and Louise were simply the unfortunate pair that met the scheming serial killers while holidaying in Italy. If they’d never have spoken to them, the dastardly duo would’ve undoubtedly set their sights on someone else. Unlike Christian Tafdrup’s Danish original, though, theydohave backstories – and they’re tragic ones, at that.

“It was very important to James and Aisling, and the more real they are as people, then they’re not just villains,” Watkins tellsGamesRadar+. “So, yeah, they have this toxic love and he’s a narcissist, he’s abusive and all of that. I think he probably did groom her in some way, but she is also complicit. There can be two things true at once.

“However messed up their relationship is, their love is probably real, and Ben and Louise look at them, and they’re free and unshackled. That may not be a great thing when you get to the core of what that means, but they look at that and they think they have some positive values. So it just makes them more interesting and nuanced, and makes the film more complex.”

While there are some major differences between the new film and the 2022 flick in which it’s based,most notably in its ending, Speak No Evil is pretty faithful in terms of its broader story beats: the couples meet on holiday in Italy, the majority of the movie takes place over a weekend, and… Paddy and Ciara are killers in the habit of offing parents and pinching their kids, before moving onto another unsuspecting couple.

Towards its end, an injured Ciara pleads to Ben and Louise and chillingly states that she “was one of [Paddy’s] firsts”, suggesting that she, like their “son” Ant (Dan Hough) was once ripped from her mom and dad by her now-husband. Unlike Ant, she’s still got her tongue, which could mean she’s lying, or it could be that Paddy’s methods have gotten a lot darker over the last couple of decades.

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Earlier in the film, Paddy opens up about his childhood, and the awful way in which his parents treated him. “People have colors and sides; if they’re just mustache-twirling villains, it’s kind of boring,” says Watkins. “And it’s all part of their con, too, I suppose. When Paddy’s making fire and he’s doing cool stuff, you go, ‘Yeah, I’d like to have a friend like that.’ Then, of course, there are sides to him that are completely unacceptable.

“Those cycles of abuse are very much encoded in the Philip Larkin poem [that Paddy recites over dinner one evening]. With Ant, there’s a theme throughout where Paddy is always saying, ‘That’s my boy,’ which is actually Tom and Jerry. I initially wanted Tom and Jerry on the TV, because the bulldogs in Tom and Jerry are called Spike and Tyke, and the dad bulldog is always going, ‘That’s my boy!’ We ended up with Chuck Norris, but the theme pertains in that violence is passed on generationally, you know? ‘Man hands on misery to man, it deepens like a coastal shelf’.

“When Ant does his thing at the end, it’s like, yeah, that’s my boy. There’s a release for the audience, there’s a catharsis, but it’s not wholly triumphant. It’s also deeply queasy in how this experience has changed him.”

Speak No Evil is in UK cinemas now, and will release in the US on September 13. For more, check out our list of thebest horror moviesof all time, or our guide to the most excitingupcoming horror moviesheading our way.

I am an Entertainment Writer here at GamesRadar+, covering all things TV and film across our Total Film and SFX sections. Elsewhere, my words have been published by the likes of Digital Spy, SciFiNow, PinkNews, FANDOM, Radio Times, and Total Film magazine.

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