[Interview] Tara Lee Talks ‘The Faceless Lady’, Halloween in Ireland, and More
The new VR horror series The Faceless Lady just premiered in Meta’s Horizon Worlds, and we talked to Tara Lee recently about her lead role in the show, as well as the real life Irish folklore that inspired the series, filming in a haunted Irish castle during Halloween, and more.
Presented by Eli Roth, written by Jerome Velinsky, and directed by John William Ross, the six-episode series is the first known scripted original VR (virtual reality) live action, stereoscopic (3D) series ever produced of its size. The Ireland-set storyline is inspired by the real life seventeenth century Irish folklore of Lady Margaret Hodnett.
In a video conversation last week, Tara told HDN that she was also already very well familiar with the real folklore legend that inspired the series. “Growing up in Ireland there was a lot of folklore, but this is one that I had heard of,” she said. “It’s based on a story of a real person called Lady Margret, and she lived in Belvelly Castle in Cork. This all plays into our show. There was a lord who thought she was the most beautiful person in the world and was trying convince her to marry him, and she was obviously not interested. And she I believe starved herself for like a year. They lay siege on the village to get to her, and when he finally got to her, she was like a shell of a human, and she was like, ‘I refuse you’.Â
“Then the legend goes that she haunts the castle through reflective surfaces and mirrors. So all of that is kind of the inspiration behind our series, which is I think is literally just an extreme version of that in a different castle.”
The Faceless Lady follows three couples who have been invited to a medieval castle in Ireland for a weekend competition where they will either win her games or lose their lives.
Lee plays Ella, one half of one of the couples, and she talked to us about what is was like filming on Halloween Night in an actual haunted castle. “It’s called Charleville Castle, in Ireland. It was near Tullamore. If you believe in ghosts, this is a haunted castle. And we were shooting it over October and November. On Halloween, we had a night shoot there, and we had crew doing seances.
“There was some really creepy stuff. One of us – I think it was Sophie (Jones), actually – she had to start a scene up in the room at the top of the stairs, and she was like, ‘Guys, you don’t want to look in that room. It’s terrifying’. And in real life, this stairwell we were working, in the 1800s this little girl had sadly fallen down the stairs, and the legend has it that she haunts this stairwell. At the top of the staircase, in the room that Sophie was starting from, it was all of her childhood things, like her crib, her toys, her dollhouse. It was just all very spooky and kind of felt like we were still in someone’s home. And that really helped, because we were terrified the entire time.”
Of course we also talked about celebrating Halloween itself, as Tara reveals her favorite Halloween costume of all time was when she dressed as Alabama Worley from True Romance, and more.
You can watch our full exclusive interview with Tara Lee below.
The Faceless Lady new episodes premiere on Thursdays in Meta Horizon Worlds, and the series is also available to watch on demand in VR on Meta Quest TV. For fans without a Meta Quest VR headset, the first two episodes are also available to watch below, courtesy of Crypt TV’s Facebook page.
