![‘Send Help’: Sam Raimi On Power Dynamics, And The Virtuosity Of Rachel McAdams [Interview]](https://cdn.theplaylist.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/29154648/%E2%80%98Send-Help-Sam-Raimi-On-Power-Dynamics-And-The-Virtuosity-Of-Rachel-McAdams-Interview.jpg "‘Send Help’: Sam Raimi On Power Dynamics, And The Virtuosity Of Rachel McAdams [Interview]")
There’s always been a mischievous rigor to Sam Raimi’s filmmaking—an ability to make genre feel like a prank pulled with absolute craft. He’s the director who helped define modern horror’s scrappy, kinetically shot absurdity with “The Evil Dead,” then later rode a very different kind of roller coaster with the mainstream breakthrough of “Spider-Man” and its sequels.
That shape-shifting instinct is all over Raimi’s terrific new genre blitz, “Send Help,” a movie that, as I wrote in my review, “shifts from office satire to stranded-island survival and then detonates into full-throttle horror-comedy chaos,” practically turning itself inside out by the time it reaches its final stretch.
READ MORE: ‘Send Help’ Review: Sam Raimi’s Bonkers Survival Horror Comedy Is Deliriously Demented
The review describes it as “practically three movies inside” one: first, corporate cruelty and control-freak office politics; then a “Survivor”-adjacent two-hander on a deserted island; and finally, a third act where Raimi “lets himself emerge,” delivering the grotesque gags, jump scares, and violent punchlines he’s built a career weaponizing.
And at the center of that evolving engine is Rachel McAdams, playing Linda Liddle, a brilliant but underappreciated consultant stuck under the boot of her boss, Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien), before a work trip goes catastrophically wrong and the film’s real subject—power, and what it does to people—moves from boardrooms to bare survival.
In a conversation with The Playlist, Raimi traced his obsession with the material back to the initial pitch from writers Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, brought to him by producer Zainab Azizi. For Raimi, the hook wasn’t just two colleagues stranded on an island—it was the cruelty embedded in the corporate setup, and the satisfaction of watching the hierarchy collapse.
My position was that the film felt it was written as the first two acts—more than enough for just a single movie—, but when Raimi got on board, he wanted to zhuzh up the entire thing. Modest to a fault and giving the writer much praise, he eventually backed up my hypothesis.
“I was blessed with these two writers, Shannon and Swift, who came up with the pitch and my producer, Zainab Azizi, brought the fellows in, and they pitched it for me,” he explained. “It was much shorter. I mean, it was the whole story, but I really loved it. I loved the hook of an ill-treated woman who deserves to be treated well and deserves to be recognized as held down by this corporate structure. The boss is a real ass, and he’s so unfair to her, and he’s secretly taking her job from her and that she was earned and giving that promotion to some guy that is a real schmoe.”
The film’s first movement—outlined in the review as a tale of office politics and workplace mistreatment—sets up Linda as the undervalued strategist at Preston Industries, overdue for a promotion while her boss steers credit and power toward himself and his inner circle. Raimi said what initially grabbed him was how cleanly the premise weaponizes that dynamic, then violently flips it.
“Anyway, she was treated terribly, and I love it when they pitched that he was going to use her for one more event to use her skills, treat her badly for the good of the company,” he said. “They go to this merger on a plane, and the plane crashes. And everyone dies except her. She swims to the island, and there she finds him alive. He made it to shore. And how the power dynamic would shift from there to her being more and more powerful and him realizing, ‘I’m worthless. I’m weakness. I’m too weak to survive here.’ And she’s starting to grow with that power.”
But Raimi wasn’t chasing a simple payback fantasy. The thing that truly interested him—what turns the movie into something uglier and more psychologically slippery in that delicious third act—is what happens when the person who’s been oppressed finally has leverage, and begins to enjoy it.
![‘Send Help’: Sam Raimi On Power Dynamics, And The Virtuosity Of Rachel McAdams [Interview]](https://cdn.theplaylist.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/29154530/SH-02011_R-1024x618.jpg)
“And then her starting to be corrupted by that power,” Raimi said the way the characters evolved from their plot circumstances. “And that was really interesting to me. And that’s what they had. And I said, ‘Let’s make that picture.’ That’s going to be great. So it turns out that whole hook that got me was just what it ended up being, only in the beginning.”
That framing dovetails with the review’s argument that “Send Help” doesn’t stay in a single lane: it begins with corporate satire in New York, drops into island survival, and then, without getting into spoilers, finds new angles—new “layers”—that complicate who Linda is and what she’s capable of.
Raimi emphasized that Shannon and Swift did the heavy structural lifting, with him pushing and heightening once the skeleton was in place. He used a metaphor that feels like a thesis statement for how he approaches material: find the suit, then dress it.
“They gave me a real solid suit of clothes, and I had to dress it up,” he said of that third act and how he pushed the writers to take it into its more-bonkers conclusion.
He also argued that the finished film wasn’t built solely through writing. In Raimi’s view, a meaningful slice of the movie’s electricity came from watching McAdams and O’Brien work in rehearsal and on set—staying inside character, reacting, improvising, and discovering tiny turns that don’t read as “ad-libs” so much as lived behavior.
“They came up with most of the plotting, but then I would push in certain areas,” Raimi said of the writers. “It was really 90% of those boys writing the great script. The actors, I would say, contributed… Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien. And they worked so hard on understanding their characters, and so much time was spent rehearsing and them owning the characters… and for me, it was, keep rolling, [cinematographer] Bill Pope, keep rolling. I’m not saying cut.”
Raimi singled out O’Brien’s instincts for comedic texture—especially the kind of quick, selfish self-preservation that can be both funny and revealing. “Dylan, especially his one-liners and his insights into moments, adding lines to describe what he was thinking that really made the thing come to life for me,” he said.
The director also admitted that casting O’Brien wasn’t immediate. According to Raimi, the role proved strangely challenging to fill—actors would meet, express interest, then back away after sitting down with Raimi and McAdams.
“We couldn’t find the right person to play that part,” Raimi said. “And we talked to a lot of different actors, and they were interested. But after meeting with Rachel and me at dinner, they all said, ‘No, it’s not for me,’” he laughed. “Finally, I learned of Dylan… Zainab Azizi and I loved his movies, loved his performances, and absolutely, we’re so lucky to have him. So, so fortunate. We said, ‘Yes, please take the part.’”
Still, the conversation kept circling back to McAdams—because “Send Help” asks for a particular kind of performer: someone who can play credible emotion, dark humor, and physical extremity without winking, without losing the character, and without making the tonal shifts feel like a gimmick. Raimi spoke like an actor with complete command of the instrument.
“She is a real performer,” he said. “She’s funny and smart and is in touch with her instrument, as actors say. She knows how to play a part and live it. And her body is so connected to her mind. And when her mind inhabits that, it makes the decision to inhabit that character, and the body is there. She’s just all in, 100%.”
Raimi traced that appreciation back to working with McAdams on “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” and the way she modulated the same character across variations without making it feel like a different person wearing a different costume. For Raimi, it wasn’t just range—it was precision.
“In the multiverse, she not only played the character she created in ‘Doctor Strange,’ but she also played a version in the multiverse that had a slightly different background,” he said. “And I saw her manifest the same character with subliminal tweaks… And I thought, she’s fascinating. It’s like a musical instrument, watching it play.”
![‘Send Help’: Sam Raimi On Power Dynamics, And The Virtuosity Of Rachel McAdams [Interview]](https://cdn.theplaylist.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/29154528/SH-07907_R-1024x640.jpg)
Then came the kind of Raimi anecdote that lands like a punchline but reveals something fundamental about McAdams’ approach in ‘Multiverse of Madness’: her refusal to treat even the silliest material as beneath her. Raimi described giving her knowingly corny action direction involving demons, ghosts, and physical gags—expecting an eye-roll, getting a professional problem-solver instead.
“And in the reshoot, I added a little bit of cheesy fights, which I like to do,” he said. “And we put in, I had to say to her on set, ‘This is where the demons from the netherworld have come out. And they punch you in the jaw.’ And I’m waiting for her to say something and take this lame direction from me, and she thought for a moment and said, ‘What angle do you want me to approach the couch and at what speed, after the ghost hits me?’ She’s so willing not to think that’s silly, but how can I make this great? She’s a pro. Fighting ghosts and demons is my hobby, by the way,” he laughed.
Raimi closed by describing the shoot as a joy—built around longtime collaborators and two actors willing to play, invent, and keep pushing. “Having these two actors that were so playful and excellent and willing to create, it was a joy,” he said. “I’d love to recreate that experience.”
“Send Help” is in theaters now via 20th Century Studios.
Rodrigo Perez is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Playlist, which he launched in 2008. He has worked in entertainment journalism since 2000, including at MTV, and has written for SPIN, IndieWire, Pitchfork, Complex, Magnet, and various music, film, and entertainment publications over the past two decades.
