•According to a report by IGN, Carrie-Anne Moss says she was researching the mythology behind her new AMC+ drama Yaga just before being cast for it.
The actress, best known for roles in blockbuster fare such as The Matrix, Star Wars: The Acolyte, and Jessica Jones, said she had been thinking about the Baba Yaga story “a week before” she was brought on board.
“I loved the fact that this had the lore of Baba Yaga. I’m someone who has always been interested in that story,” Moss said. “It does work like that a lot for me, where I’ll have a thought about something and suddenly a script will come across my path that has some kind of connection. I take those kinds of little nods from the ether as serious.”
Yaga, which is debuting an exclusive clip as part of IGN Fan Fest: Fall Edition, offers a modern twist on the classic Baba Yaga myth. Based on the play by Kat Sandler, who serves as showrunner, the show follows Rapp (Noah Reid), “a private investigator who arrives in the small coastal town of Whittock to investigate the disappearance of a young heir to a powerful fishery, Henry Park (Hudson Williams). He finds himself at odds with an apprehensive local detective, Carson (Clark Backo), a charismatic university professor with a taste for younger men, Katherine (Moss), and a labyrinth of enigmatic suspects, secret lives, and ancient magic.”
Moss said her interest in Baba Yaga—a legendary, sinister female monster from Slavic folklore—goes back decades. “I had come across that story when I was in my 20s through a book called Women Who Run With the Wolves. There’s so many ways to tell the story. There’s so many different versions of her.”
Fans may best know Baba Yaga as the nickname of John Wick, played by Moss’s Matrix costar Keanu Reeves. At one point in Yaga, her character humorously deadpans “What’s John Wick?” when the franchise is mentioned by another character.
Moss said she recognizes fans might consider the line a meta joke, but she sees it differently. “I’m a huge fan of John Wick, so I’ll start with that,” she said. “And honestly, when I read that line, because it was written a couple of different ways, I’m always hesitant to put a nod towards that kind of thing. And it’s not something that I intuitively want to do. It’s not my thing. I think I shot it. I said it a couple of different ways, and in the end they choose what they want to put there. So I understand that it’s kind of fun. I understand why it was there, and I’m okay with it being in there, but it’s a throwaway line.”
Moss said she embraced the unbothered nature of her character Katherine during production, especially for scenes with Hudson Williams.
“I have some intimate scenes with younger men in this show,” Moss said. “My sons are close in age to Hudson. I mean that’s what you do as an actor, right? I mean you’re comfortable with that, but at the same time I was respectful of that too. And you feel… I don’t want to say embarrassed[ed] but I could be his mom. And if you have scenes like that, you’re just kind of keeping your own energy, you’re keeping your own distance in a way because you don’t want to suddenly be their mom, which very easily can happen when you’re a nurturing person.”
Saying the cast and crew filmed at a “breakneck pace,” Moss said she preferred it to more drawn-out shoots. “I think I was there for three weeks,” she said. “I have never ever experienced that where it was really fast. Normally when you’re shooting something, you’ll have a lot of lull time in between takes, which is actually exhausting. On this show, there was no lull. But when there was a hangout, it was definitely fun.” She added that Noah Reid and Clark Backo “made me laugh so hard” on set.
Moss said she remembers being caught up in movies as a kid during the ’70s and ’80s, returning to theaters repeatedly. “I went to see movies that I loved as an 11, 12-year-old girl 17 times. Grease. Rocky. Bad News Bears,” she said.
Yaga premieres October 23 on AMC+.
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