Alicia Witt Had ‘an Eerie,’ Prophetic Dream About a Specific “Longlegs” Scene — Before She Even Read the Script (Exclusive)

The horror movie from Osgood Perkins stars Maika Monroe as an FBI agent hunting a serial killer played by Nicolas Cage

Some actors might dream about a movie while they’re filming it, but Alicia Witt did so before even reading the script.

“I saw the email come in that this director, Osgood [Oz] Perkins, would like to have a Zoom about the role of Ruth in Longlegs,” the 48-year-old actress tells PEOPLE in this week’s issue. “And then I went to bed and I had an eerie dream.”

The kind of “dream that you don't forget,” adds Witt, featured “a very specific scene” between herself and eventual Longlegs costar Maika Monroe. Upon reading Perkins’ script the next morning, she came across the scene in question, although “it wasn't precisely the way it was written.”

But, she says, “it ended up being precisely the way we filmed it — the precise body language of how we were physically with each other. I'd written it down when I woke up.”

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In Longlegs, Witt plays Ruth Harker, mother to Monroe’s FBI agent Lee Harker. Perhaps like Witt herself, Ruth displays prophetic psychic abilities, a useful skill in hunting serial killers like the titular character, a cryptic Satanist (played by a nearly unrecognizable Nicolas Cage). 

“I told Oz about the dream when I had the Zoom with him because I couldn't help it,” recalls the former child star of 1984's Dune. Because Perkins, 50, the son of late Psycho star Anthony Perkins, shares “some eerie similarities” with Witt, she says, the two clicked immediately.

“We've had some shared experiences that are very unusual and a little dark, and we also had a shared left-of-center sensibility,” explains Witt, who in December 2021 faced the most profound darkness of her life, when she began treatment for breast cancer just before her parents, Robert and Diane, were found dead from probable cardiac dysrhythmia due to cold in their Worcester, Massachusetts, home.

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Related: Alicia Witt Opens Up About Her Parents 1 Month After They Were Found Dead: 'My Heart Is Broken'

“There is a great light in having experienced some dark and come out the other side of it,” reflects Witt, who completed cancer treatment in June of 2022. (Since then, she’s competed as the Dandelion on The Masked Singer season 9 and recorded and performed music in Nashville, Tennessee, where she’s lived since filming the series Nashville.)

Witt’s preternatural connection to Longlegs and its writer-director continued throughout filming. She and Perkins “had such a powerful shorthand together,” she says. “Often he could look at me across the room and I would look back at him, and I knew exactly what he was telling me. I've not had a better experience working with a director than I did with Oz.”

Ultimately, she adds, Perkins and the Longlegs team “knew that we could swing on that tightrope together and that I would know how to go into this darker place — and also embrace the catharsis and the light in accessing such darkness.”

Longlegs is in theaters now.

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