There are several powerful moments in Silent Hill 2, but none hit quite as hard as Mary reading her letter to James. “You made me happy,” is just a crushing final line, and the delivery from Monica Taylor Horgan is timeless.
Coming into the remake, Salóme Gunnarsdóttir had big shoes to fill, portraying Mary, especially in this scene. Answering questions from fans on Twitch, she addressed the hardest scene for her to record, going straight to that infamous bit of correspondence.
She couches her experience in a story of Maria Callas, the world-famous singer, who would chastise students for being too outwardly emotional in their performances. The audience should be the ones crying, not anyone on-stage – you hold the energy in to let it spill out of others.
Gunnarsdóttir applied this philosophy to Silent Hill 2, but she found it hard going. “I was really making sure that I didn’t cry, because I didn’t want to take that for me, I wanted to leave that for other people,” she recalls.
“he first day we did mocap, we did a reading of the letter at the end of the day. And I was pregnant, so I found it very hard to read through that. [There were] a lot of emotions. But I kept them. The way they taught us is that you put the lid on the pot, and you try to stop it from boiling.”
Comparisons sprang forth to Horgan, who cried during her recording of Mary’s letter, but wisely, Gunnarsdóttir put those aside and focused on simply doing her own rendition. Even the guidance on-set was minimal.
“We did a few takes, they were all just one whole reading of the letter. They were doing the really nice thing that they did in everything, which was really honoring the original,” she remembers. “They were just like, ‘Hey, come here and we need you to read this.’ They didn’t explain to me the context of what the original was and what people loved about it, [or] how they would want me to match it.”
The result is a different, but no less beautiful take on a heart-wrenching moment. The kind of thing we all hear… in our restless dreams.