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Lesley Manville Loved Grotesquerie’s ‘Jaw-Dropping Reveals,’ Is Open to Revisiting Redd in Possible Season 2: ‘I’m Sure They’ll Want to Do More’

Andy Swift
3 min read
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As haughty, naughty Nurse Redd on FX’s Grotesquerie, Lesley Manville turned in one of the most memorable performances of the TV season. But she’ll just have to take our word on that.

“I haven’t actually watched it yet,” Manville admits to TVLine. “But my son is watching, and he’s absolutely loving it.” The actress, who is performing in a London production of Oedipus while simultaneously filming a new movie, has “no room for it at the moment,” she explains. “And I want to give it space.”

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Manville relished her son’s passionate reactions as the unpredictable season unfolded, and while “he loves to think he can work out the mystery before it gets revealed,” she assured him, “You’re not going to work it out.” And he didn’t. When he arrived at the end of the game-changing seventh episode, she says he was “jaw-droppingly shocked by it.”

Manville conveyed a similar sentiment to series creator Ryan Murphy after reading the script for Episode 7. “I emailed him immediately, saying, ‘I don’t think in my whole career I’ve ever read such jaw-dropping reveals, or had the rug pulled out from under my feet as to what I thought was going to happen.”

Grotesquerie‘s bonkers concept was only part of the reason Manville agreed to play in Murphy’s sandbox. What really sold her was the show’s unexpected humanity.

“For all of its excess, it’s actually a series that is looking at the state of the US,” she explains. “It’s very much a state-of-the-nation piece. It’s also a very emotional piece about how lost people are, and how you cope with loneliness. What Ryan does brilliantly is navigate difficult, real-life dilemmas — politics, religion, how to survive as a person, how to get through life, how to find a little corner of happiness for yourself, how to have some love in your day. He has his own beautiful way of looking at all of those complex dilemmas, and I really take my hat off to him in the way that he navigates the human condition.”

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Manville enjoys playing characters with whom she has little in common, and the “massive cherry on the cake with Grotesquerie” was that she got to play two of them. “The theatrical, heightened, over-the-top, comic book nature of Nurse Redd was incredibly appealing to me,” she says. “It was Ryan who said, ‘Look, why don’t we play her British? It’ll just add something to it.’ When we finally get to Episode 7, you see that she’s actually American, because that’s where she lives and that’s where her life is. That was very challenging to me.”

Rather than bringing this season’s storyline to a logical conclusion, the Oct. 30 finale ended on a cliffhanger, with Lois figuring out (but never revealing!) the identity of the show’s titular serial killer. This leaves the door open for any, if not all, of the cast to return — and Manville is “certainly open to discussions on that.”

“[Redd] is such a great character,” she says, “and the series been successful, so I’m sure they will want to do more. I mean, they need to come up with it and approach me, but that’s the other side of the whole thing, which obviously has nothing to do with anybody else.”

Regardless of what the future holds for Redd, it feels like she has already established herself as one of the Murphyverse’s most memorable characters. Still, Manville says there’s one thing that could guarantee her icon status: “I think Ryan’s secret wish is that people start to want to dress up as Nurse Red for Halloween.”

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What are you hoping to see in a second season of Grotesquerie? And were you satisfied with that finale cliffhanger? Grade the episode and show in our polls below, then drop a comment with more of your thoughts.

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