Directors who remake already great movies always get some suspicious side-eye from yours truly, but Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho and core protagonist Patrick Bateman are perhaps more uniquely suited for bizarro vampings. With the adaptation-worthy stage musical, the lore-expanding Sumerian Comics series and the literary meta-verse of Ellis’ Lunar Park and other works as proof of concept, I’m not so nervous about Luca Guadagnino’s upcoming take on American Psycho. Even less so if OG co-star Chloë Sevigny is involved.
The Oscar-nominated actress is currently promoting her star-studded upcoming 2025 movie After the Hunt, which happens to be her third and latest collab with Guadagnino. Given their closeness, she’s not only aware of his ties to American Psycho, but also his DC movie that was recently put on hold, and she shared some A+ thoughts on both while talking to IndieWire.
Chloë Sevigny Wants To Reprise Her American Psycho Role In The Remake
I realize I didn't yet say that I think Chloë Sevigny is as brilliant and talented as they come, and her penchant for taking on offbeat projects from the very start of her career continues to win me over. Amusingly enough, Patrick Bateman's secretary Jean is one of her less out-there roles, and I might even go so far as to call her adorably square. Which makes her ideal as one of the film's key survivors.
That survival is itself key to how she'd appealed to Luca Guadagnino to return for his American Psycho project, despite the fact that it would be a fourth-wall breaking return. As she put it:
I pitched to him that I should play Jean again, and that they do that reverse-aging on me. I thought that would be something that he would be into, conceptually having the same actress play the same part. But I don’t know. He said he was going to think of something else for me.
Perhaps the director just couldn't see a proper way to factor "reverse-aging CGI" into the budget. Though I'd dare say Sevigny wouldn't need such drastic measures to play Jean again if that were the only sticking point.
But even if she won't be back in secretary form, I can't wait to see how she ends up playing into whatever version of American Psycho makes its way to theaters.
I Love Chloë Sevigny's Quaint Description Of DC's Shelved Sgt. Rock Movie
In expressing her interest to work with Guadagnino again on the psychological horror novel's adaptation, Sevigny noted at the time the interview took place that she wasn't sure if he would be working on that or the DCU film Sgt. Rock, which the filmmaker was set to film with Colin Farrell before it was recently put back into the development cycle, making it the first canceled-esque project for James Gunn's DCU.
The timing wasn't great, but the way she referred to the comic book project was splendid:
I thought he was doing a World War II picture.
To be sure, Chloë Sevigny is presumably telling no lies in making the connection between World War II and the character Sgt. Rock's origins as a WWII soldier, and the various war-centric comic arcs that he factored into for decades. And I'll cop to Luca Guadagnino being the kind of director who can step into any genre and create a "film" as opposed to anything resembling schlock.
But Sgt. Rock went on to engage in lots of clandestine conspiracy-tinged stories well beyond on-the-boots warfare. And the team-up he probably associated with the most (beyond the military) was horror squad Creature Commandos. Speaking of, horror fans should absolutely check out Bruce Campbell and Edward Risso's six-issue miniseries Sgt. Rock Vs. the Army of the Dead.
With all that in mind, I can't help but chuckle at thinking of anything in James Gunn's DCU being dubbed "a World War II picture," as if it were meant to share conversational space with The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Thin Red Line, or Schindler's List. Not wrong, but not quiiite right.
Should American Psycho Actually Be Remade? With Remake In The Works, OG Film Creatives Speak Out
Sevigny and Luca Guadagnino previously worked together with romantic cannibals on Bones and All and the coming-of-age HBO miniseries We Are Who We Are. And After the Hunt could very well be their biggest team-up to date, with Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield and Ayo Edebiri also heading up the cast. Sevigny says the college-set thriller will be “polarizing,” so expect some fun convos.
At this point, that’s the only actualized film that audiences can look forward to seeing in the near future, while development continues on the others. Meanwhile, she can also be seen in a pair of indie films — Amalia Ulman’s El Planeta and Durga Chew-Bose’s Bonjour Tristesse — which are currently in theaters.
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