Deborah Ann Woll and Jeffrey Donovan star in Jordan Downey’s genre-bending monster movie The Cycle (94% on Rotten Tomatoes). The film is likely to catch viewers off guard, as it defies its own initial setup. We caught up with Woll and Donovan and asked them which scary movie did the same for them by defying their expectations.
“The Descent for me,” Woll said. “That movie shifts genres so many times. I think it’s such a fun movie, but you start out thinking it’s one thing, then it shifts [on] you, and you’re thinking, ‘Oh no, it’s this kind of movie.’ And then it shifts again for a final time. And it’s just… I don’t know. I love that movie.”
Donovan picked an all-time classic. “Yeah, for me, The Silence of the Lambs was something that I’d just never really seen before,” he said. It takes you down a path that says, ‘Oh, this is kind of a psychological thriller,‘ but then you go, ‘Why am I rooting for the most ruthless, conniving monster on the planet? Go Hannibal. Yeah, take down those guards.’ I don’t know how they did it, but that switched for me because you think you’re rooting for the FBI, but you’re secretly rooting for the evilest man on the planet.”
Woll and Donovan aren’t strangers to the supernatural genre by any stretch of the imagination, appearing in everything from True Blood to Witchblade. Yet there was something special about The Cycle that drew them both to this project.
“Oh, I think it was the quality of the writing, first and foremost,” Donovan said. “Jordan [Downey] had created a world from page one. And by page 10, you could see he was in complete control of it. And then halfway through the movie, it changes tone and genre a little bit. You go, ‘Well, how are you going to pull this off?’ By the end, you go, ‘I got to meet and chat with this director because he is so talented.’ He set the bar so high to try to create something that’s so new and fresh, and as you know, it’s hard to stand out in this day and age of something that hasn’t been seen before. And then how clever audiences are. Will they see it before it’s revealed? And I think that’s what first attracted me to it. And I’m so glad, in my opinion, he pulled it off.”
Woll agreed. “Just to add into that, and I think Jeffrey would agree, the characters were so interesting,” she said. “They were, again, different from what we were used to seeing in terms of archetypal horror tropes. I loved seeing a geeky lead heroine, and she seemed kind of unlikely in our traditional sense as a hero. But then it made all the sense in the world when it went with the story.”
Watch a short clip of the interview with Deborah Ann Woll below.
RELATED: The Cycle Review – Deborah Ann Woll Leads a Thriller That Looks Like Fincher and Ends Like Carpenter
The Cycle is available on Shudder.
The Cycle |
|---|
A daughter unravels her father's dark past after his body, missing for 36 years, is found at a horrific crime scene. |
 |
|---|
| Studio: Shudder |
| Running Time: 1h 51m |
| Release Date: Oct 23, 2026 |
| Cast: Deborah Ann Woll, Jeffrey Donovan, Gretchen Corbett, Jack Doolan, Will Hochman, Keith Opper |
| Director: Jordan Downey |
| Writers: Jordan Downey, Kevin Stewart |
| Genre: Horror, Thriller, Crime |
| Box Office: N/A |
