Bringing "Dead Lover" to Life: An Interview with Actor and Director Grace Glowicki

“You are often put in little boxes. I think all of those little pressures, for whatever reason, have made me want to be really rebellious and inappropriate as an actor whenever I can.”

Rhayne Vermette

Grace Glowicki and I sit huddled over an order of truffle fries, a pale non-alcoholic beer for her and a glass of ruby merlot for me, in a back corner of The Commoner in Toronto’s Roncesvalles neighbourhood. It’s a stylish but cozy establishment, carefully balancing modern gloss with warm nostalgia. Massive TVs play any sport you fancy above the sleek bar at the centre, while age-stained photographs and newspaper clippings hang neatly on the walls in a careful disorder, illustrating the West End neighbourhood’s history and the building’s place within it.

Glowicki suggested the spot: it’s a place familiar to her, she comes here often to hang out with her friends. And I can see why – as the late afternoon fades to evening, the interior of the space becomes muted, the silver becoming soft, and even as the clinking and twinkling sounds of the dinner rush swell within the place, the two of us are able to hold our conversation with the warmth and abandon of life-long friends. Part of it is my wide-eyed curiosity about Glowicki; I’ve been trying to interview her since the release of 2023’s Booger, but for various practical reasons we weren’t able to connect until now, for the festival run of Dead Lover, a gross Gothic romp of a film, overflowing with guts, sticky bodily fluids, and horniness.

The film has received widespread critical praise, hailed by many as an instant cult classic, and for good reason. Vulnerable and earnest while maintaining the grainy moodiness of all the best exploitation films, Dead Lover is about love, is a veritable ode to the pains and pleasures of the act of loving. The film follows lonely and stinky Grave Digger, played by Glowicki, desperately seeking romantic companionship. She finally finds it in Lover (played by Glowicki’s real-life husband Ben Petrie), a man too-good-to-be-true. Depending on how you read him, Lover is a hapless romantic or a Gothic fuck boy; nonetheless, he apparently adores Grave Digger’s stink, has endless amounts of sex with her, and eulogizes her in the way every lover ought to. But when he dies at sea, Grave Digger, grief-stricken, embarks on a mission to bring him back to life with a determination that would make Mary Shelley proud.

Working with Lover’s thumb — the only part of his body that remains after he is swallowed up by the sea — and a strong knowledge of the earth, botany, and chemistry, all passed down through the women in her family, Grave Digger brings to life a being who might love her no matter what. If Lover won’t stay, she will make him stay. But the film’s brutal lesson, its blunt twist, is much like Shelley’s in Frankenstein, it is a lesson in the realization of others’ autonomy: Grave Digger's Creature (Leah Doz) has her own needs. In the way that Grave Digger lives for love, so too does the Creature; both love and need love to a degree others might think is monstrous in its proportions. In the Creature, Grave Digger confronts her own hunger, and realizes, tragically, what it means to satiate it.

Glowicki has never been afraid to get weird on screen. In 2019’s Tito, Glowicki’s directorial debut, she plays a man beaten down and preyed upon by the outside world, who is slowly learning to live and trust again. It is at once frightening and sweet, about the need for companionship and its ability to save one from trauma. Mary Dauterman’s Booger, meanwhile, is about the debilitating weight and proportions of grief, painting a heartbreaking image of what it looks like to, simply put, not be doing well after the loss of a best friend. It vividly depicts how sadness stalls us in a kind of grotesquerie, eating the same leftovers day after day even after they have gone bad, obsessively looking for a lost cat to the point one starts coughing up furballs. Glowicki is spellbinding in both these films, and others yet, playing her characters with immense humanity, with a deft and unparalleled ability to not just cerebrally understand the pained or ugly, unsavoury or strange, aspects of being alive, but also what it looks like for a body to experience earth-shattering sadness or anger or fear. She excels at playing characters loudly out of step with normal society, and who thereby reveal that normal society is potentially unhealthy for its quieting constraints. For the ways in which they embody the prickly aspects of love and companionship, her characters are always more resonant than the “normal” people who troop through her characters’ worlds.

Fearless and endlessly curious, Glowicki is a force. She has an awe-inspiring ability to embody the verboten and the abject, especially when it comes to female characters, wearing with a resounding loudness that which is gross or too much, everything we don’t want to see from women. In my conversation I learn that this comes from an organic need in Glowicki to voice what is mundane to her, and to many women. Glowicki is keenly aware of how society teaches women that we ought to be ashamed for visibly being in the ways Glowicki’s characters are, telling us we ought to define themselves in negative relief against these characters, that we ought to be everything these women are not. But Glowicki’s characters are anything but shy, and by virtue of their vibrancy and loudness, they are emboldening.

Dead Lover is a celebration of the abject. Defined as what troubles or makes anxious our system of order, society, and identity, the abject is aligned with the body and desire, distinctly against what is lofty or heavenly or objective. The abject is the monstrous feminine, madness, earthliness, menstrual blood, saliva, pussy juice. Where a film like last year’s Nosferatu delineated the feminine abject only to punish it, returning ultimately to the cold and objective cleanliness of patriarchal order, Dead Lover lives for the abject, splashes around in it, throwing vaginal fluid, stink, and viscera up into the air and dancing beneath it as it rains back down.

The film shows that it’s impossible to ignore the body, for it is the vehicle through which we love and feel love. Leaning far away from cold order and rationality, and deep into disorder, desire, and yearning, this film is a scintillating festival of the feminine experience, of life embodied and viscerally alive. Here you will find intense feelings of loneliness, joy, hunger, sadness, confusion, and even dumbness, all rushing and cresting as mightily as the sea. With Dead Lover, Glowicki has penned an unforgettable force of nature, a classic celebration of passion.

At The Commoner, Glowicki answers my eager, rambling questions with patience and grace, and an equal measure of excitement not just for her latest film, but also for art itself. Slowly but surely, as I had expected it to, over the course of our conversation, a fulsome image of the writer, director, and actor emerges: she reveals herself to be one of the most invigorating, fearless, and compelling creatives working today, unabashedly challenging notions of femininity and the potential of film itself with every artistic step she takes.

Alisha Mughal: How did Dead Lover come to be?

Grace Glowicki: It was a very unconventional writing process where I didn't have an idea for my next film after Tito. I have a couple of brilliant friends that I have always wanted to work with, but didn't really know how. So I got it into my head, “Okay, I'll just call these friends and try to spitball with them.” One of them is a therapist, one of them's Ben, my husband, Harry Cepka, a filmmaker I've acted for, and Haya Waseem, who's another director I've worked with. I would call them and spitball just super general story ideas and character ideas. And from these oral sort of spitballing, storytelling places, the story started to develop. I think my friend Harry was like, what about a gravedigger? I was like, “Oh, gravediggers are cool. Let's talk about gravediggers.” And then my friend Matthew was like, “Oh, I had this castration dream.” And I'm like, “Tell me about it.”

So we, through association conversations, built the general vibe of the story. I took it to Lowen Morrow, who I had seen in a theater troupe called Sex T-Rex in the city and who's an amazing theater maker, and then a clown named Adam, who I had seen in a play. Then my friend who also does dance and experimental theater. I got these theater weirdos into a studio, took this oral idea, and workshopped it with them on their feet. That was kind of the second draft, but still wasn't in script form. I took that to Ben, and Ben and I penned the script. It was two years of unconventional story building, orally on its feet, before it came to script form.

AM: How did you come to choose Frankenstein as the frame for this story?

GG: The Grave Digger started more as the frame - we tried to explore the concept of a stinky gravedigger who is looking for love, who then gets it and then loses it and she only has this finger. What would someone who is in this situation, a pariah who got the one person that loves them and now has this finger — where does that go? My mind went to reanimation plots, and from there we ended up with Frankenstein as a model, but I think it more so started just from the character, and fell into a Frankenstein archetype. So it was by chance that I made a Frankenstein movie, but it ended up fitting the character: sex and delusion and death and love. It was like, “Oh, this is Mary Shelley, basically.”

It's morbid and romantic, but I'm not very well versed in any of this stuff. I was kind of just trusting my unconscious for the things I've soaked up about reanimation plots and Frankenstein and Mary Shelley and horror movies. I was operating in an associative mode. I would say I'm pretty understudied in all of the references; I just grew up in this contemporary world where I've seen Frankenstein cartoons since I was a kid or heard about it, so it all sort of seeped its way in.

AM: You must have read the book, how did you incorporate that text into your text?

GG: This is controversial, but I've actually never read the source text. I was so hesitant to admit this to people in interviews, but I started to realize that because I wasn't setting out to make a Frankenstein movie, I was okay with the fact and interested in the fact that I was going to use what I had interpreted as a person living now, born in 1988. There's so much the unconscious soaks up about these stories, having never read the source material. I've never read The Odyssey, yet I could tell you a lot about it. I was interested in, What is the pulp fiction version of this? What is my natural knowledge of this stuff? I'm very under-read and kind of stupid about it, but I think there is sort of a brilliance that comes from what you've inferred about something, just being in the world.

AM: What were you looking at while making the movie? What were you watching? What were you reading? What were you absorbing?

GG: I was listening to The Bride of Frankenstein soundtrack. That was the soundtrack we'd put on when we were writing the script and stuff. And then thinking about Monty Python, Mel Brooks, and the theater troupe aspect of those things and how much fun they seemed to be having. I grew up on Dumb and Dumber and Ace Ventura, and I was thinking of these sorts of bigger, hammier comedies that I so enjoyed. And also theater. I started in theater pretty casually, but I was always moving into indie film, and was missing the feeling of being in a theater play. I was kind of chasing that feeling of making a play with people when you're young and don't know what's what, and just having a good time together. So those were the North stars.

AM: Stylistically, is that why the film looks the way it does?

GG: Totally. The first play I did was in a black box theater in Montreal, and we had no budget, no props, just basically pot lights and actors. Since going to a lot of theater plays, there's something about the aesthetic of it where it's so creative and they don't have anything to work with. Yet, as an audience member, I'm always stimulated enough just watching an actor in a light perform with a prop. It's like, Oh, okay, there's something there, even though the classic convention of cinema tells you that's not enough. I was like, No, I think it is. Cheap, DIY, theater aesthetic — that's what I want.

AM: There’s a lot going on in the film around love and then grief over this idea of love being lost. What really resonated with me was this idea of creating a person in your head without them really being there, in front of you. Just this rumination. How did this aspect of Grave Digger develop?

GG: The emotional truth of the movie for me is one I had been working through in my own romantic relationships, the idea of when you're holding onto a version of a relationship that's dead and you're so scared of letting it evolve or letting it go that you double down and cling, because you're just so scared of losing someone. I had gone through that in my life, just clamping down on someone as opposed to letting them go. That was a dynamic I was interested in: if you love it, let it go.

And in my case, this was a phase of me and my husband's relationship where I was clamping down instead of giving someone space to go do things they needed to do. Of course, in our case, the relationship evolved and changed, but we stayed together. I think that was the relationship dynamic I was working out in the movie — when you get so delusional out of fear of losing someone, what length you'll go to to avoid pain and grief. [Grave Digger]'s sort of a tragic figure in that she doesn't let it go and then it ends up killing her.

AM: Her motto is literally dig deeper and never stop digging.

GG: Never stop digging!

AM: What was it like directing and also starring in Dead Lover?

GG: I'm comfortable with it because I had done Tito. I've acted with so many other directors, in some ways this was easier than acting in someone else's thing, because you have so much control and don't have to negotiate your performance with the director. As a performer, I find it very easy to act in my own things because it's like I'm steering the ship, so I don't have to negotiate anything. I find that quite liberating in a way I think is unusual. I'm so performance focused as a director that it takes a big part of the job out of it to be the lead performer.

AM: I don't know if you're going to think this is a bad thing to say, but I think you're so brave in the characters that you play, especially the female characters that you play. You're so unafraid to be gross women and women enjoying grossness in ways that women socially and culturally are not supposed to be enjoying. I'm still thinking about one of Lover’s lines, when he said he wants to eat her poop like a banana.

GG: Yeah, best line ever. I love that line.

AM: Is this something you set out to do, or is it just a natural inclination to allow these women to just be as gross and stinky as possible?

GG: Actually, people would probably argue with me about this, but as a person in social environments, I'm actually not that brave at all. I am anxious and trying to fit in, trying to figure out how to do the thing always. I think that tendency of mine creates a real repression. But then I found this weird way to let it out. When I'm a character, it's like there's a safety in performance that I don't feel just as a normal person. So I'm not that outlandish or brave in my regular life, but as an actor, for some reason, I think I counterbalance all the things I suppress in my regular life and let it spew out. I think I'm that way because I need that release valve from regular social life. It's sort of a rebellion, like, I gotta get this shit out of me.

Whether or not that's healthy, I don't know. But I think that's where that comes from in me, psychologically. I think too, being a woman, and being in other people's movies, and being in a system where I'm auditioning, there's so much containment and restrictions from what people think of you, what they think you're capable of, how they write women, how they direct women, all this stuff. You are often put in little boxes. I think all of those little pressures, for whatever reason, have made me want to be really rebellious and inappropriate as an actor whenever I can.

AM: Freud obviously talks about letting go in art what you can’t do in society. I say stuff in my writing that I have a hard time saying in my everyday. I feel like I’m much better in writing. Do you think that you’re better in your art as an actor than you are in person?

GG: Oh my God, totally. I feel like the most uncharismatic person in real life. I am constantly struggling to figure out how to connect with people and how to negotiate space. I feel like I'm so much more myself as a director and as an actor. And it's confusing, right? Because you're like, what is it that mentally gives me permission in this space that I can't grant myself in regular life? It's very perplexing, but I think because it's fictional, there seems to be a freedom from consequence, or something, in make-pretend land.

AM: I've been thinking a lot lately also of the monstrous feminine and the feminine grotesque. I recently read about “the abject,” and in society what the abject a lot of the time is is women: menstrual blood, saliva, sweat. In the film, Grave Digger sniffs slime from a log and tastes it, and after a while she realizes, it’s pussy. The film talks so candidly about these things. Why is that important? Should we be talking about feminine fluids more?

GG: I think it's just navigating [womanhood]. Me and my husband are trying to get pregnant, and I had a miscarriage, and I've had breast lumps. I was even just talking to a woman yesterday about how she's going through menopause and there's just so much that isn't talked about women's bodies and the different things we go through. It's all these strange private experiences with fluid and blood and bumps and lumps and grief and life and death and all of this stuff. There's such a shame culture around it, it isolates us from each other and keeps this pristine veneer of being a beautiful woman or something.

Especially in the context of a horror genre, we're actually so familiar with all of this shit, and yet we're not supposed to be, or we don't talk about it, or we hide it. I'm interested in the fact that it's kind of inappropriate, but it shouldn't be. I think I'm interested in things that are deemed socially inappropriate, but there's actually no reason for it. If something is evil, I'm like, yeah, let's keep that inappropriate. Let's keep that off the table. But when there's no actual reason for it, it's like, this is strange and it draws me toward this.

AM: I wanted to talk about smell. In the latter half of last year, a woman named Ally Louks went viral for her PhD thesis, and the worst people on the internet, men mostly, were making fun of her for it, and worse. Her thesis is called Olfactory Ethics, the Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose. The bullies said her research was a waste of time, etc. But smell means stuff culturally. Why did you choose to make Grave Digger smelly?

GG: I've been obsessed with smell. I thought it was such an interesting challenge to translate into cinema because cinema is like sight and sound and movement and you can't smell unless you're doing smell-o-vision. But for the most part, you cannot communicate that sensory experience other than through implying it. And as an actor, [...] it's just a fun physical thing. You're getting, because of people's reactions to each other and their behavior, you're understanding that someone smells bad. And for some reason that just really fascinated me.

[...] I actually think I may have read this woman's paper that you're talking about. I learned, I think from, I'm not sure, but I think from that paper, that there's a whole history of racism with smell, and there’s high class and low class with smell, and academics don't take it seriously because there's no fine art connected to all of this. So I thought it was cool that it was like the reject scent, and yet pheromones and stuff — we're just animals and there's a part of us that picks our sexual partners because of the way they smell. And even as a woman, women become sensitive to smells of different things as a way I think sometimes to avoid contaminants and getting a food disease. It's just such an important part of our survival that we undervalue.

I like smell a lot. And then I just watched Polyester the other night, the John Waters movie, and I was like, Oh, this makes me want to make another smell movie!