Sissy Spacek Went Full Method Actor To Land Her Iconic '70s Horror Role In Carrie

Stephen King reached a new milestone in September 2025, overtaking Agatha Christie to become the author with the second-most screen adaptations behind William Shakespeare. To date, there has been over 100 movies and TV series based on the Maine author's works, resulting in some all-time classics like "The Shining" (although King hates it), "The Dead Zone," "Misery," and "The Shawshank Redemption." But for all the Stephen King stories we've seen on our screens over the decades, one of the very best adaptations was also the first: Brian De Palma's "Carrie," which was incidentally based on King's first novel. At its heart is an iconic horror role that Sissy Spacek went full Method to land.

"Carrie," of course, is a coming-of-age drama with a dark supernatural twist. Spacek stars as Carrie White, a painfully shy teenager who suffers daily at the hands of her fanatically religious mother Margaret (Piper Laurie) and the spiteful bullies at her high school. Gradually, she comes to realize she has telekinetic powers, which emerge in full and frightening force when her tormentors play a cruel prank on prom night to humiliate her in front of the entire school.

King originally started "Carrie" as a short story to experiment with writing a female character, and he only reluctantly fleshed it out into a novel after his wife rescued an early draft from the trash. Once it was published, the book became a paperback best-seller, and De Palma was among its admirers, encouraging United Artists to quickly pick up the film rights in the ensuing bidding war. But although De Palma knew Spacek personally, he had another actor in mind for the lead role at first.

Sissy Spacek had made her eye-catching breakthrough role in Terence Malick's "Badlands" a few years earlier where she met her husband, production designer Jack Fisk. Fisk later worked on Brian De Palma's cult rock musical "Phantom of the Paradise," and Spacek assisted with painting the sets.Although she was well-known to De Palma, however, the director had his eye on Betsy Slade for the lead role in "Carrie" when he moved on to adapting King's novel for the screen.

Nevertheless, De Palma still encouraged Spacek to read the book with a view of casting her as Chris, the chief bully role that was eventually taken by Nancy Allen. Spacek ended up auditioning for several characters before De Palma also allowed her to read for the lead, and she decided to go full Method in order to convince him to cast her as Carrie. She even made her hair greasy with Vaseline and wore an old sailor's dress from her high school days, and recalled a girl she went to school with to put herself in Carrie's downtrodden headspace (via Rolling Stone):

"She was beautiful, but she was poor and didn't have money for clothes. So, she wore antiques, and the kids were really brutal with her. I remember always loving her clothes, baggy and old-fashioned like they were. She was barefoot most of the time, but there was no hip, groovy scene then."

Spacek's approach landed her the part, and Fisk broke the good news while she was sitting in the parking lot after the audition. She joked that they quickly drove off before De Palma could change his mind.

Brian De Palma made the right choice because Sissy Spacek's performance in "Carrie" is remarkable. Prim and bird-like, she has an ethereal vulnerability that makes you instinctively care for her — I always prickle with anger when she is subjected to abuse from her mother and her school colleagues. Cinematographer Mario Tosi films Spacek's unconventional features with a gauzy softness that makes it seem like she is in danger of evaporating. This is also why it's all the more terrifying when she finally lays waste to her tormentors with her telekinetic powers.

Almost 50 years later, the sight of Carrie staring murderously while covered in gore is one of horror cinema's most defining images. As scary as Spacek is in the climactic prom scene, we still never lose sympathy for her, even when some kindly characters also get caught in the split-screen psychic rampage. According to Jack Fisk, Spacek's performance made the film the classic it is:

""The other girl played Carrie as someone you could hate. You could understand why everyone made fun of her. You didn't really care about her much yourself. Sissy, you felt hope for. You could almost fall in love with Carrie White when she played her, and it made the film twice as effective. De Palma said there was no contest."

"Carrie" was a critical and commercial success, and both Spacek and Piper Laurie received Oscar nominations, losing out to Faye Dunaway and Beatrice Straight (both in Sidney Lumet's "Network"), respectively. Those performances are solid, but certainly nowhere near as iconic as Spacek's — and nobody in the sequels, remakes, and stage productions since has managed to get close.