“I Can’t Turn Off My Smarty-Pantsness”: Daredevil’s Deborah Ann Woll on Why Karen Page Seeps Into The Cycle

Deborah Ann Woll is best known for her role as Karen Page in Daredevil and The Punisher. She gets to flex her acting muscles in Shudder’s horror film The Cycle (94% on Rotten Tomatoes), where she plays forensics expert Dr. Meg Garland. It’s a different role, but there’s still an element of Karen in Meg.

In our interview with Woll, she explained how she tackled Meg differently, while acknowledging where the similarities lie. “I think one flaw I have in my acting is I can’t turn off my smarty-pantsness,” Woll said with a laugh. “It would be very difficult for me to play someone who isn’t extremely curious, inquisitive, and interested in things. But I think for Karen, there’s this overwhelming kind of moral compass, right? It’s not the same as Daredevil’s, and it’s not the same as Frank Castle’s, but it’s all about saving the world and stopping death from happening and kind of that vigilante superhero side perspective.

“Whereas I think for Meg, it is much more about solving the problem. What is this thing? And I spoke with [director] Jordan [Downey] a lot about it, and we even put it in the movie. There’s a moment where I’m three inches from this creature. It’s a moment that should be terrifying, but instead, Meg is mesmerized. She has to know what it is. She has to figure it out and solve the problem. And that, in some way, is the most paramount. She can be a little single-minded in that way. And yes, she’s going to have an emotional arc sort of in spite of herself.”

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Woll’s co-star in The Cycle is Jeffrey Donovan of Burn Notice fame. His character, Marks, is a police officer who’s drawn into this story. While Meg needs to solve the mystery of her estranged father’s death, Marks deals with his own arc surrounding his son, Ian (played by Will Hochman).

We asked Donovan if he drew any parallels between Marks’ arc and Meg’s, especially when it comes to the dynamic of parent and child. “Oh, wow, a very good question,” Donovan said. “Being a father of younger children – not someone as old as Ian – I realized that when you play a dad in any kind of movie, TV show, or on the stage, [that] if you are a father, you realize how much more there is to being a dad than they can ever put on a page. It’s so complex, so contradictory, so much learning and becoming knowledgeable. And then all of a sudden, one day you go, ‘I know nothing about parenting.’

“That’s kind of hard to bring all of that to a role. But the thing that I tried to do most was how it served the script: How proud I was of him in the beginning, of what a fine young man he became, and how hard I worked on doing that – like I do with my own children. So that when, or if something happens, the turn is magnified that much more, if that makes sense.”

RELATED: The Cycle Review – Deborah Ann Woll Leads a Thriller That Looks Like Fincher and Ends Like Carpenter

The Cycle, starring Deborah Ann Woll and Jeffrey Donovan, premiered on Shudder on October 23.