‘The Creep Tapes’: Mark Duplass on His Wife Katie Aselton Finally Bringing Angela Onscreen in Season 2

Greetings from the intersection of VHS, IYKYK, and WTF!

For those of you unfamiliar with the location, it’s exactly where The Creep Tapes reside. Shudder’s beautifully bizarre sequel series to the uber-indie and underrated horror movies Creep and Creep 2 is essentially an anthology culled from the video recordings of a serial killer (The Morning Show’s Mark Duplass, reprising his role from the features he co-wrote with director Patrick Brice) who is equal parts sinister, sympathetic, and comically dramatic. Imagine a deeply needy drama-school failure with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, an addiction to being on camera, and a subscription to an Axe of the Month Club.

And in its terrifically upgraded second season, we get even more insight into this enigmatic killer, a nod to Saw, the worst Christmas Eve therapy session ever, and six original showcases for the immensely gifted Duplass as he torments a new batch of targets. Much like in Season 1, his victims are (mostly) strangers who have answered his online postings looking for a videographer, unaware that they have signed their own death warrants. But this time, there are a few exceptions, and they are exceptionally rendered.

“We wanted to expand the scope a little bit and try some different things, different camera formats and expand the visual language of it,” explains The Morning Show standout of the out-of-the-norm offerings. “We wanted to have a lot more recklessness and fun. I think that we were a little nervous in the first season about how [found-footage conceit] would translate from feature film to short-episode format. And then once we sort of landed it and saw that people liked it, we felt like we had a handle on what we could do.”

Patrick Brice

Additionally, Duplass admits that he and Brice “wanted to make sure we didn’t repeat ourselves or get too conservative. To me, the best version of this show has wild swings in it. It’s not meant for every episode to be everyone’s cup of tea. We want to try and push things around a little bit. The whole reason we made the movie in the first place is that it was a completely creative endeavor with zero studio or financial interference. It was me and my close friends getting our weird on. So, keeping that spirit alive is the center of this.”

And do they ever get weird. In the season’s first outing, we get a master class in darkly macabre freakishness from Duplass and cult-fave eccentric David Dastmalchian (Late Night with the Devil), who guest stars as an almost willing participant-slash-copycat of Creep‘s central maniac. In fact, early on, it’s not clear which one is more off-center.

“I mean, look, it’s a toss-up when you get David and myself in a room,” agrees Duplass with a laugh that is far less unsettling than his on-screen alter ego. “We had this wonderful experience where we were showing The Creep Tapes at Vidiots in L.A., and David was there. We had never met him before and were fans of his and he was fans of ours and he was actually sitting right next to Patrick and Patrick’s wife watching the show. Then, during a particularly oddball moment [on screen], he leaned over to Patrick and he’s like, ‘You are so f**king weird, dude. I love you guys.’ And we were like, ‘Would you come do one next season with us?!’ So yeah, I sort of built that episode for and around David.”

Patrick Brice

Another addition to the Creep canon is actually a callback to the films: Duplass’ wife Katie Aselton, who had an uncredited voice cameo as the killer’s never-seen lover Angela in the original film, finally brings the character to life in one of the season’s most unbridled episodes.

“Bringing Katie into this show was this wonderful, beautiful thing. When we were making the first movie, it was such a haphazard experience. We were working off of a five-page outline, we were constantly shooting and reshooting and discovering it along the way. And at a certain point, I just called Katie and I was like, ‘Can you do a phone scene real quick?’ We had this idea, and it was in the middle of the night, she’s home, literally putting down our children. And I was like, ‘Just help us with this.’ And so we took Patrick’s phone and did a phone call — I put the name ‘Angela’ into his phone number so it would show up on the screen and Patrick still comes up as ‘Angela’ in my phone, I’ll never ever change it — and we got that moment with Angela.”

It was a one-time bit that nobody imagined would be more than an Easter egg, Duplass admits. “But that’s the beauty of this whole universe, that we do these random things haphazardly and then they become our lore. We’ve been talking since 2014 in the original movie that we have a plant here, we have Angela and how are we going to use this? So you’re going to see her this season and it’s probably not the last time you’re going to see her.”

Without spoiling why that is, Duplass rightfully heaps high praise on the scene-stealing Aselton for infusing her performance with the booze-soaked energy of a Real Housewife of Indie Horror. “Katie is the greatest drunk performer on screen that you’ll ever see. It’s one of my [joys], I just love watching her perform. And watching her be the unhinged drunk…it was just a wonderful confluence. It’s hard to explain.”

Almost as hard as explaining exactly who Duplass’ wolf-masked madman is. Because he assumes so many different identities and alleged backstories, he’s been referred to as Josef, Wolfie, Peachfuzz, Father Tom Durkin, even Jeff Daniels (not that one). And depending on his victim and the setting, there seems to be an awful lot of discrepancies regarding the killer’s motives and morals — which allows Duplass to pull so much from his performer toolbox.

Patrick Brice

“The great part about this character is that we don’t know what his real name is. We don’t know where he comes from. And every time you think you’ve got a sense of the lore or what’s going on with him — we had the episode with his mother in the first season and you feel like you got a sense of it — you then have to realize that this is the most unreliable narrator that we’ve ever seen, I think, as a protagonist. And so the way I like to talk about him is that almost everything he says is not factual, but almost everything is true in some way, shape, or form. And the goal of this show is that, just when you think you’ve got him pinned down, you might realize that what we presented to you might not actually be what happened.”

So, will we ever find out the truth? Don’t bet on it. When asked how many iterations Duplass has hanging around in his imagination, he simply smiled, again in a way that wasn’t alarming, thank god.

“I think the answer to that is that I think it’s endless, and that’s because of a few factors. The most central might be how absolutely obsessed this guy is with movies and the time he has spent in front of the television. Not that I would know anything about that,” he jokes. “What that has done is spark his desire to live in those worlds which he has seen and loved while sitting very lonely in front of the television for a long time. It has created a desire to create a world in which he can be them. So that to me, when I look at that formula, I’m like, ‘Oh, I think we’re going to be making this show until I’m 80 years old!'”

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And that doesn’t creep him out one bit.

“The essence of what I love about this character is that I love him, I understand him, I see where he’s coming from,” he explains. “I see a person who is deeply excited to connect, who has some questionable skill sets, but in some ways has a set of moral and ethical integrity systems in place that I sort of love about him. I can’t really choose which of the different personas he takes on as one of my favorites, but the essence of him just being an excitable little love bug looking for approval is very close to my heart.”

The Creep Tapes, Season 2 Premiere, Friday, November 14, Shudder