Just looking at her resume, it's clear that Kate Siegel enjoys playing the roles of spooky and mysterious characters. Although some actors (and even viewers) may stray away from the things that make us jump, Siegel thinks horror can be good for the soul. "Horror helps people process trauma. It's a safe place to be afraid because you know it ends," she told Entertainment Weekly while promoting The Haunting of Bly Manor in October 2020. "This is a particularly excellent show for that. It shows that this type of fading away can be fought through human connection, and love, and it's important." Referencing the coronavirus pandemic, she added, "It will allow people to vent a little bit, and maybe let go of some of this grief and trauma we have from being stuck in our homes."
Since Siegel's character in the Netflix series, Viola, is trapped in her house by a curse, so her story may resonate with people around the world who have been in quarantine amid the pandemic. "If I say to you 'she sleeps, she wakes, she walks,' you can know what that feels like to be trapped in your house," she told the outlet. "We're not trapped in our houses by a decades-old curse, we're all there because we choose to be like Viola."
It probably doesn't hurt either that Siegel's husband, Mike Flanagan, loves the genre as much as she does. "You are my favorite person on the whole planet," the star gushed via Instagram on the couple's anniversary in 2020.
