WEAPONS Originally Had a Whole Chapter About That Creepy Mystery Character
One of the earliest twists in Weapons completely changes what audiences thought they were getting. The marketing made it seem like every kid in Ms. Gandy’s (Julia Garner) class had vanished, but that’s not the case.
Spoilers ahead if you haven’t seen the movie!
One student, Alex (Cary Christopher), is still there, and as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that Alex, and more importantly his family, are at the heart of everything.
Enter Gladys, Alex’s unsettling aunt played by Amy Madigan (Field of Dreams). She wasn’t really teased in any pre-release material, but her first clown-like appearance immediately sets off alarm bells.
As the film builds toward the chapter focused on school principal Andrew (Benedict Wong), the truth comes out, Gladys is an evil witch with the power to bend people to her will. She turns Andrew into a killer and manipulates others, including the missing kids, for her own dark purposes.
But the big question is… why? We know Gladys wants to extend her unnaturally long life, but how kidnapping these kids ties into that goal is never fully explained. Is she draining their life force? Possessing them for some ritual? We don’t know.
The film doesn’t offer any details about her past, how long she’s been around, where she learned her magic, or if there are other witches like her. That mystery, as it turns out, was a deliberate choice.
“In an earlier draft of the script I had given her her own chapter,” Cregger told io9 about cutting her backstory. “It was a little bit of an origin before she came to town. But I realized that it was just giving too much away. It’s more compelling to not know some of these things. So I ended up cutting it very early on in the writing process.”
Some of those answers still exist, just not on screen. “For [Gladys], I kind of had an idea of what was going on with her,” he said. “And I talked with Amy [Madigan] about that somewhat, but I also want to respect Amy’s process. And I want her to take ownership, and I want her to kind of create her own mythology.
“So I gave her a couple of options of what I think might be going on. And then I kind of didn’t ask her too many questions about where she landed with it.”
So while Weapons makes it crystal clear who’s behind the disappearances, it leaves the bigger picture dangling. The answers exist, but they’re locked away in the director’s head and in Amy Madigan’s interpretation of the role. Which means the scariest thing about Gladys might be that we’ll never really know everything she’s capable of.