What To Know
- Carrie-Anne Moss stars as an enigmatic professor who plays a seductive cat-and-mouse game with men in AMC+’s new series Yaga, inspired by the legend of Baba Yaga.
- The show explores themes of female aging and rage, with Moss’s character serving as an antihero femme fatale.
- Moss explains Yaga Episodes 1 and 2, featuring Noah Reid, Clark Backo, and Hudson Williams.
Carrie-Anne Moss‘ Katherine Hargrove in Yaga will make women excited to grow old. At least, that’s the power the character had on me when watching Kat Sandler‘s adaptation of her own play of the same name. Yaga episodes come out on Fridays on AMC+ as of October 23, and the first two are available now. In Yaga, Moss casts an alluring spell as a smart and sexy professor who plays a scintillating cat and mouse game with men for her own pleasure. There’s never a moment when she’s not in complete control as Yaga‘s mysteries unfold, despite naive attempts to seduce and disarm her from detective Charlie Rapp (Noah Reid) and missing millionaire Henry Park (Heated Rivalry‘s Hudson Williams). Warning: Yaga spoilers ahead!
The Matrix legend was reading about Baba Yaga when the offer to star in Yaga crossed her desk. Moss was revisiting a book she read at age 20, Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, which uses mythology to explore the rites of passage women experience as they age, as research for her own writing on her women-centric website, Annapurna Living. The book contains a section about the Baba Yaga myth from Slavic folklore, and “about a week before I got offered this role, I had opened the book up again,” Moss tells TV Insider. It was like Baba Yaga was reaching out of the pages and luring her in to play the enigmatic osteologist.
AMC+
“I am literally reading the script and right next to it is this book that I’ve been writing [about] and looking at how can I see this myth or lore in real concrete ways of being a woman going through the different phases of maiden, Crone, mother,” Moss says. The magical quality of the coincidence made her pay close attention. “I take those coincidences serious,” she adds.
Baba Yaga is just as mythical and mysterious in Yaga as she is in the legends about her. Depending on the story, the woman is either an evil witch who fries and eats children or a nice old woman who helps the hero, and she lives in a house perched on chicken legs. The mystery of why residents of the coastal town of Whittock find her so fascinating, and questions about what’s being done in her name, unfolds throughout Yaga‘s eight episodes.
Reid, of Schitt’s Creek and The Vampire Lestat, is absorbing as Rapp, a slimy private investigator hired by the wealthy Park family to find their missing son, Henry (Williams, who also plays Henry’s lookalike friend, Logan). Rapp meets Whittock’s Sergeant Carson (Letterkenny‘s methodically understated Clark Backo) on the job. Their methods don’t gel, but they learn how to work together between Rapp’s frequent flings with local ladies.
Rapp is immediately drawn in by the alluring Katherine when they cross paths in a bar in Episode 1. Moss oozes an easy charisma as Katherine, whose self-assuredness is a prize of aging. She’s successful, intelligent, sexy, and unimpressed by Rapp, but she enjoys seeing his attempts to seduce and entertains herself by playing along.
AMC+
“Noah’s a great actor,” Moss tells us of that bar scene, admitting that “there was a lot of anticipation” around it. It establishes Katherine as the antihero femme fatale, whom Sandler previously told us was inspired by Hannibal Lecter and Dexter Morgan. “I wanted to write a female character whose badness we could enjoy along with her,” Sandler said. Moss surely enjoyed it.
Katherine seduces Rapp by describing the sensuality of bones while whispering in his ear. His trance is interrupted by calls from other women.
“I love the last moment when his phone’s ringing, we get to really see who he is,” Moss says. “All these different girls are ringing his phone, and Katherine gets her books together and is packing herself up, and he goes, ‘Hey, no, no, no.’ She goes, ‘Well, you just seem very busy.’ He goes, ‘No, no.’ And then she just looks at him like, ‘Huh.’” Next thing we know, Rapp is in bed with a woman you think is Katherine, but he’s only fantasizing that it is.
“I love that last beat. The power move she does just with her physical body of like, ‘Huh, OK, maybe, maybe not,’ but she’s in charge, you feel that,” Moss explains. “If we watched the next move, she would’ve been like, ‘No, bye, little boy, I got to go.’ It’s fun.”
Later, Rapp has his wits about him when interrogating Katherine in her office with Carson (below). They’re seeking information about Henry from Katherine after discovering a connection between them.
“He’s very good at manipulating and getting what he needs,” Moss previously told us of Rapp in this scene, but he’s not outwitting Katherine.
“You get two manipulators meeting toe to toe, and that’s what the scene becomes,” Moss said, “whereas Clark’s character is just so much more pure in her execution of that. Her heart is cleaner.” But will it stay that way?
Carson is shocked by Katherine’s open sensuality and is almost embarrassed by it despite the fact that they’re apparent strangers, Moss says. They share an unspoken language by nature of being women.
“You can see her disapproval of the way that I move through the world,” Moss says of Katherine and Carson.
“Truthfully, out of all the characters in the show, Clark’s is the most difficult to play,” according to Moss, because she has to be the sane center of an insane story. However, the events of this season will test Carson’s tolerance for community misdeeds.
At the heart of Yaga is a story about female rage and revenge against corrupt systems that turn vulnerable people into collateral damage for the town’s most powerful residents. Henry’s disappearance, Logan’s questionable connection to the Parks, and Rapp’s arrival are connected to festering secrets that are bound to boil over.
Yaga, Fridays, AMC+
