The Big Picture

Welcome to a new episode of Collider Ladies Night with
The First Omen
star, Nell Tiger Free.
During her conversation with Collider’s Perri Nemiroff, Free revisits her acting journey from getting scouted to headlining a new installment of one of the most iconic horror franchises of all time.

The First Omen
is in theaters nationwide now.

Nell Tiger Free is proving to be quite the genre powerhouse. After starring in four seasons of the widely acclaimed Apple TV+ series, Servant, alongside Lauren Ambrose, Toby Kebbell, and Rupert Grint, she’s now headlining a brand new Omen movie, The First Omen, directed by yet another soaring force in the horror space, Arkasha Stevenson.

The film takes place before the events of Richard Donner’s 1976 classic and focuses on Free’s character, Margaret. Margaret grew up in an orphanage where she suffered horrific hallucinations and visions. As a result, she was abused by the nuns in the facility. As a young adult, Margaret is in the novitiate phase and heads off to Rome to become a nun. While there, the pain she carries from her tumultuous childhood collides with the discovery of a sinister agenda unfolding around her, a combination that causes her to question her faith, and everything she thought she knew.

In celebration of The First Omen’s big debut, Free joined me for a Collider Ladies Night conversation recapping her journey from first discovering her passion for acting to finding an ideal collaborator in Stevenson while making The First Omen.

Free didn’t always have the itch to act, but when someone else recognized her raw talent, it didn’t take long for acting to become a deep passion and craft she knew she’d have to keep pursuing. Free recalled:

“When I got scouted, it was the first time I considered acting, obviously. I remember doing my first audition — the first audition I can remember — and thinking,
‘This is the most exciting, interesting, weird world and I want to stay here.’
I auditioned for Horrid Henry. It was my first ever audition and I got down, rumor has it, to the last seven or something to play one of the kids in Howard Henry and I remember thinking, ‘Oh, maybe I could do this,’ and then I just sort of decided that I was going to.”

After making the decision, she did just that. Early on in her career, she scored a role in one of the biggest shows of all time, Game of Thrones. She also starred opposite Miles Teller in Too Old to Die Young and, of course, enjoyed great success with M. Night Shyamalan’s Servant. But, she was quick to highlight The First Omen as a top-tier on set environment. In fact, she called it flawless. Here’s how she put it:

“This movie, the on set environment was absolutely flawless. There was such a kinship and a friendship between everybody, and everybody really wanted to be there. And there was not one actor, nor crew member that I had one harsh word with. Not once. And, you know, we had Arkasha as the captain of our ship.
The director, I find, in my opinion, sets the tone for how the set is gonna run and how it’s gonna feel, and Arkasha just set this tone of patience, kindness, listening to one another, never cruelty, never.
It was just the most beautiful, lovely work environment, and I was so happy to go to work every day.”

Not only did Stevenson exude patience and kindness, but Free also found her to be an ideal collaborator, one with no ego.

“
What Arkasha has that makes her one of a kind is that Arkasha has no ego.
She doesn’t have an ego. She’s willing to listen to other people in a way that it’s not like they’re just nodding and waiting for their turn to speak. When you talk to Arkasha, Arkasha’s really listening. If you have a concern, Arkasha’s concerned about it, too. And she made everything collaborative, but she was still very much in charge.”

Nell Tiger Free on Directors: “Genius Does Not Have to Be Synonymous with Madman”
Image via Disney

23:38 Related ‘The First Omen’ Director on the Joys of Making a Disney Movie with a Vagina Arkasha Stevenson recaps her journey to making her first feature, a studio horror movie that addresses autonomy over the female body.

Free’s impassioned acknowledgment of Stevenson’s standout qualities as a leader on set, veered into a conversation about some less ideal, and downright inappropriate, ways of running a set. She explained:

“The best way I can describe it is that
genius does not have to be synonymous with madman
. It doesn’t have to be synonymous with ruling with an iron fist or inciting fear. You don’t have to be cruel to people. You don’t have to hurt people to have them portray hurt people, you know? It’s actually quite the opposite. Arkasha made me feel so held and so safe that I wanted to go a million miles an hour for her, you know? And
I’ve had experiences in the past where, in order to get a performance out of me, I’ve been bullied or harassed or tortured emotionally because that’s what I was supposed to be doing in the scene
. We’re all capable of doing that without you having to force it upon us.”

Free paused for a beat, surprised to have to discussed the topic at such length, but quickly asserted:

“It’s important to talk about because it shouldn’t be taboo to talk about your negative experiences. I don’t think it should be. I think it’s important to share those, especially women to women sometimes. It’s important to look out for one another. And, in this case, Arkasha looked out for everybody.”

On the set of The First Omen, Stevenson looked out for everybody. But, what happens on a set when Free doesn’t have a director looking out for her that same way? Free offered up such an example when asked for the first time she stood up for herself and felt the power of her own voice on set.

“I actually remember the exact first time that happened, and it was in my own defense, which was a very new experience for me. I was okay, sometimes, with the defense of other people, but in my own defense, I was always quite meek.
I was quite young at the time and there was a scene where I had to be in my bra, and the director at the time told me to stay in my bra the entire time and have the crew set up around me while I was in my bra and light the scene around me.
Now, as a grown woman, even being asked to do that initially I would say absolutely not. No way. There’s no reason for that. But at the time I was like, ‘Well, maybe this is what I’m supposed to be doing.’ I sat there for around two hours, and people are coming and going in and out of the room, and something came over me where I was like, ‘I’m not supposed to be sitting here and I don’t need to be sitting here like this for two hours.’
I quite forcefully said, ‘I’m not gonna sit here anymore and I’m going and I’m putting my top back on and I’ll come back when you’re ready for me.’
It was the first time I ever stood up for myself, and I just did. I got up and I walked out and then I came back. And I don’t think anyone was trying to do anything insidious. I think it was just a disregard that somebody could be really uncomfortable in the situation.”

Hopes are high with voices like Free’s and Stevenson’s getting louder and louder in this industry, situations like this will dissipate until they’re eradicated completely.

‘The First Omen’ vs. ‘The Servant’

Digging into The First Omen, specifically the character of Margaret, I asked Free about finding the core of a character who’s going through so much. Given how much past trauma Margaret is carrying and how deeply shocking and horrific her current situation is, I asked Free if she devised an anchor of sorts for her, something she could always turn to to give the character a consistent truth no matter the extremes she faces. Here’s what she said:

“In previous characters I’ve had that. I’ve had something like that. But with Margaret, Margaret doesn’t really have a consistent truth.
I think an obvious answer would maybe be her faith, but I don’t think that’s correct because I don’t think she does ground every choice that she makes in her faith, because I think she’s kind of unsure about it.
She kind of falters and wavers, and she’s clung to that because it’s something that’s made her feel like she belongs, but she doesn’t necessarily know if she feels it, you know? So Margaret doesn’t have a consistent truth because she’s been told everything that she believes to be true.
Her life is a lie. That’s why she has this erratic kind of energy
, because she doesn’t actually have anything to hold on to.”

Margaret’s erratic energy was a game changer from Free coming off of playing Servant’s Leanne for four years, a character who’s extremely focused and controlled. She explained:

“There wasn’t a lot of wiggle room for things like that because Leanne is a very specific character. She was centered and measured and still and the observer. So I couldn’t gesticulate or anything with Leanne, or anything like that. So I found it really freeing being able to move my hands when I spoke and give sort of a bit of light and shade to the physicality of it. And I think I learned quite quickly with Arkasha that there wasn’t a lot that we weren’t willing to try, you know? We tried a bunch of different things and a bunch of different versions of different things, and we just had a lot of fun trying to find what felt like too much or what felt like too little. We’re trying to find that nice middle ground to keep it from being ridiculous and to stop it from being something that could be misconstrued as being quite funny. We didn’t want it to be that.
We wanted it to be really disturbing and really weird and unsettling, so everything we did, we just tried to do the creepiest that we could possibly imagine.
”

Nell Tiger Free Discusses ‘The First Omen’s Epic “Demon Dance”
Image via 20th Century Studios

There are many examples of Free and Stevenson swinging for the fences in that respect in The First Omen, but there was one particular scene that, initially, was so above and beyond, it gave Free pause. “I was worried initially about what me and Arkasha have now named the Demon Dance, which is a moment where I crawl out of the wreckage of the car.”

She continued:

“When we were coming up to it,
I was worried about my own capability with tackling it and I was thinking, what if this looks funny? What if it looks silly?
I didn’t know if I was gonna be able to perform it in a way that made it harrowing and disturbing. I thought this could so easily veer into the territory of being quite comical and being something quite silly. But again, I know I say all the time, I had Arkasha.
The energy changed on set that day, and there was just this moment right before we did it where I thought … ‘Fuck yeah. We can do this.’
We can do this because everything just kind of felt like the energy of the day, I know this sounds really woo-woo-y, but it just landed at this moment where everyone was exhausted to the point of delirium, so we were all kind of in this giddy, weird, delirious headspace. It’s just one shot, and it was a six-minute take, and we just did it and it was a fabulous experience.”

Looking for more on Free’s experience as an actor thus far and her time on set with Stevenson making The First Omen? Be sure to check out our full Collider Ladies Night interview in the video at the top of this article, or you can listen to the conversation in podcast form below:

The First Omen A young American woman is sent to Rome to begin a life of service to the church, but encounters a darkness that causes her to question her faith and uncovers a terrifying conspiracy that hopes to bring about the birth of evil incarnate.Release Date April 5, 2024 Director Arkasha Stevenson Main Genre Horror

The First Omen is now playing in theaters in the US. Click below for showtimes.

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