Annabelle Wallis spent months studying a woman history largely overlooked, and Netflix’s “Unabomber” has turned that work into her most prominent role in years.
Wallis plays Christiana Morgan, the psychoanalyst who co-directed the Harvard Psychological Clinic and helped run the stress experiments on a teenage Ted Kaczynski. The film, which debuted Sept. 25, climbed to the top of Netflix’s chart. Jacob Tremblay plays the young Kaczynski, Russell Crowe plays Morgan’s partner Henry Murray, and Shailene Woodley plays FBI agent Joanne Miller. Janus Metz directs.
Morgan gave Wallis a figure with real intellectual weight. She co-created the Thematic Apperception Test, an image-association exercise that appears in the film when Kaczynski auditions for a campus debate club. Metz told Netflix’s Tudum site that Morgan worked at the top of Ivy League academia and that he wanted her to carry gravity in the story. He credited Wallis with delivering it.
Wallis said the research surprised her. “I was fascinated to learn about the extent of her involvement,” she told Time, describing Morgan and Murray as collaborators who devised the controversial tests used on Harvard students.
The film presents Kaczynski as unaware of the experiments’ true purpose. He believes he is debating, while the sessions feed a government-linked effort to study mind-control techniques. Metz has said the Harvard chapter remained unknown to most people, and some viewers did not realize Kaczynski attended the university at all. He has also said the film is not a full biography. It offers a dramatized look inside Kaczynski’s mind. Kaczynski carried out a bombing campaign between 1978 and 1995 that killed three people and injured 23.
The role arrives at a busy moment for Wallis. She told The Hollywood Reporter she followed the dense, character-driven “Unabomber” with the action film “Mutiny” by choice, calling herself a contrarian who wanted both kinds of work. She also recently welcomed her first child with partner Sebastian Stan.
Wallis built her name in horror and period drama, with roles in “Annabelle,” “Malignant,” “The Mummy,” “The Tudors” and “Peaky Blinders.” Morgan gives her a different kind of part, a real woman whose contribution to American psychology rarely gets credit.
