Nell Tiger Free is ready for her jump scare in The First Omen

As with any truly genre-defining film, a great horror movie has a tendency to seep into popular culture, reverberating far beyond the jump scares audiences experience in the theatre. Take Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 classic, The Shining, which gave us many iconic moments, and the lingering image of a crazed Jack Nicholson, poking his head through a hole he just cut in a door, yelling, “Here’s Johnny!” When someone describes projectile vomit as being like “something out of The Exorcist”, it’s a testament to the enduring impact of the late, great William Friedkin’s 1973 horror movie. Long fingernails? Freddy Krueger. Angry dog? Cujo. And who hasn’t mimed a stabbing gesture, while trying to recreate Bernard Herrmann’s unmistakable all-strings score from Alfred Hitchcock’s seminal 1960 horror flick, Psycho? You can add Hollywood legend Richard Donner’s 1976 supernatural classic The Omen to this list. Starring the one and only Gregory Peck and Lee Remick as parents who unwittingly adopt the Antichrist, The Omen gave rise to the pop cultural phenomenon of nicknaming a misbehaving kid Damien. “Have you met Sharon’s boy? Mate, that kid is basically Damien, glad he’s not mine,” one might’ve said. British actor Nell Tiger Free was born two and a half decades after the release of The Omen, but the star of the highly anticipated new prequel, The First Omen, knows firsthand how that goes. “My mum will tell you that I was also a devil child,” Free laughs on a Zoom call with PLAY. “My older sister was just so calm and chill and serene and slept through the night, and I just had so much energy, like I couldn’t walk five seconds without falling over. “And I would just run off and be climbing trees, falling out of them and escaping, like I just really was a nightmare, honestly, the most exhausting toddler of all time. “That’s probably why I do this job now, because my mum put me into like, Saturday drama club just so I could get some energy out.” That decision by Mum certainly paid off when Free was cast to play Myrcella Baratheon in seasons five and six of Game of Thrones, which she leveraged into a starring role in M. Night Shyamalan’s psychological horror series for Apple TV Plus, The Servant. In the latter show Free played Leanne, a softly spoken and mysterious nanny, who is revealed to have escaped a cult, and may herself possess supernatural abilities. “I was 19 when I got the role, and I spent four and a half years on that set,” the 24-year-old says. “And it was kind of like my uni mixed with my first grown up experience in the acting world, and working so closely with Night, over such a long period of time, and my co-stars, was so fantastic. “It really just was like a big acting masterclass for me, I kind of stalked them all and studied them and watched them and stole their tricks, and I couldn’t have made The First Omen if I hadn’t spent four years on The Servant.” Speaking of The First Omen, the prequel serves as Damien’s origin story, which means this is probably as good a time as any for a little refresher on Donner’s film. Peck and Remick played Robert and Kathy Thorn, a US diplomat and his wife, living in Rome. Kathy gives birth to a son, who subsequently dies, but Robert is convinced by a priest, unbeknownst to Kathy, to adopt another child and raise it as his own. Five years later the couple is now living in the UK, with Kathy, who is pregnant again, believing Damien is her biological son. That’s when things start to unravel, starting at the kid’s fifth birthday party, where his nanny hangs herself in front of the gathering, after uttering the famous line, “Look at me Damien, it’s all for you”. It gets a whole lot worse from there, under the expert direction of Donner, who would go on to make a few films you may have heard of — Superman, The Goonies and Lethal Weapon. Needless to say, it’s a horror classic for a reason, just ask Free, who is an unashamed devotee of the genre. “I love horror films, I really, really do,” she admits. “They are what got me into films, I mean, I kind of discovered my love of cinema through my love of great horror. “It’s just such a fun experience going with your friends to see a terrifying movie, and I think that The Omen is kind of the pinnacle, and is still terrifying to this day. “I’m just such a big fan, and so honoured to now be a part of the story, it’s quite, quite trippy.” In The First Omen, Free plays Margaret, a young American woman, sent to Rome to begin a life of service to the church. If you’ve seen the film’s trailer, you know the new movie contains a callback to the original in the form of a woman self-immolating in front of a convent full of nuns and kids, after uttering the line “It’s all for you”. Exactly who the “you” is here remains to be seen, but it’s safe to assume there’s a dark force at work, and Free’s Margaret will have to confront it. “She goes through a lot, for sure,” Free says of her character’s journey in the film. First-time feature director Arkasha Stevenson shot the film primarily on location in Rome, after working on TV shows such as Legion. “Arkasha says this thing about the original Omen, that she doesn’t see it as a horror film,” Free reveals. “She sees it as really bad things happening to nice people, and I think that we’ve kind of emulated that in this film. “Margaret is a sweet woman, and she finds herself thrown into the middle of these terrible things happening to the people around her, and to her too, and it’s just exhausting for her, she really doesn’t catch a break.” Caught in a dark conspiracy that stretches into the upper reaches of the Catholic Church, Margaret faces all manner of evil, and Free couldn’t have been happier about it. “It’s always fun to play a character like that, because, the weirder and stranger and more intense the material, the more room you have as an actor, and the more fun you kind of have with it,” Free says. “So, even though it does not look like I’m having a good time when you watch the film, I really was.” However, she does admit there was one genuinely scary moment on set, but it had nothing to do with the material. This moment of terror was entirely due to the realisation that she was about to share a scene with British acting royalty, the inimitable Bill Nighy, who plays a Catholic cardinal. “There was just a simple scene between me and Bill, and he was dressed in his cardinal outfit, and I just remember sitting across from him in his costume, and I was in mine, and … there’s four cameras on us,” Free begins. “And, just in that moment, I thought, ‘Wow, this is one of those moments where you realise how much things have changed’, and that was the moment that kind of took my breath away from me.” As for what Nighy’s like to work with? “The cameras would be off and it’s Bill, who’s just like a rock-and-roller through and through … there is no one more rock and roll than Bill Nighy in my opinion,” Free says of her co-star. “And then the cameras will go on, and he’d just metamorphosise, he just transformed into this very different being, and it was really like watching a magic trick. “I just wanted to do the best job I possibly could; I wanted to feel like I deserved to be standing next to him, which I don’t think I’ll ever feel like I deserve to be standing next to Bill Nighy to be honest.” Anyone who saw Free in The Servant would beg to differ, and, now with another horror outing under her belt, it’s fair to ask if she embraces the scream queen label. “I’m enjoying being called a scream queen at the moment, it’s really satisfying for me and I’m happy to keep working in the horror space,” Free says. “I think it fits me well, and I fit it well, but, at the same time, I’m always elated to try something completely new … I just love films and I love making movies, and … I really don’t have any strict guidelines — there doesn’t have to be demonic children involved for me to get on board.” As for Damien, the OG demonic child, Free hopes The First Omen does him justice, because no one will be more ticked off than her if it doesn’t. “I get really pissed off when people mess around with really good horror films,” she says. “It annoys me, because I’m like, ‘Why are you ruining something that’s already perfect?’. “And I feel like I’m gonna get lynched by the horror community if this doesn’t go well, so keep me in your thoughts.” The First Omen is out now.