For versatile Dutch actor Michiel Huisman, a “Game of Thrones” veteran, starring in Friday’s “The Other Lamb” (on VOD and streaming platforms) was not an easy decision.
A dream-like horror film, “Lamb” casts Huisman, 38, as the Shepherd, the all-powerful leader of a forest-dwelling female cult.
“This particular cult’s religious philosophy has to do with the way they live,” Huisman explained. “He wants them to refer to him as the Shepherd and he refers to his wives and daughters as his Flock. That’s where the title comes from.”
The bearded Shepherd, a ringer for the popular image of Jesus, has total control over his red- or blue-garbed Flock.
When teenaged Selah (Raffey Cassidy) begins to question the Shepherd’s authority, it’s apparent that not just lambs are liable to be sacrificed.
“It’s a pretty scary fable that gets pretty bloody at some point. The story rides on that constant tension between the Shepherd and Saleh. You feel something is going to happen,” Huisman acknowledged last week.
“For me as an actor it was important to understand how this cult started and Shepherd’s plan for it. I had to believe it was not about being the manipulative man he’s turned out to be.
“It started with an ideology; he had something good in mind for this group. But as the movie opens, it’s clear the cult is on its last legs and things are starting to fall apart, which makes the cult leader more erratic, desperate and violent than he’s ever been.
“I remember a very early conversation with Malga (Poland’s Malgorzata Szumowska, making her English-language directorial debut) when I was still not entirely convinced I wanted to play this character.
“He’s so dark and such a terrible, terrible man to these women. But she convinced me that, in the end, it’s a movie about these women standing up for themselves: female empowerment. In that it was important.”
Huisman’s best-known American work is opposite Blake Lively in “The Age of Adaline” (2015) and Netflix’s 10-episode “The Haunting of Hill House” (2018). But his career-changer was as Daario Naharis on “Game of Thrones” for two seasons (2014-16).
“That was huge. It really opened doors that otherwise would have stayed closed. Or taken a lot longer to open.
“So far I’ve been lucky and not worried about being typecast. If you look at the things I’ve been shooting in the four years since I wrapped ‘GOT,’ it’s been all over the place.”
