Missi Pyle on How They Built the World of Unseen

Galaxy Quest and Josie and the Pussycats star Missi Pyle is one of the antagonists in Unseen, a new thriller from director Yoko Okumura, Blumhouse, and Paramount Home Entertainment. The film centers on Sam Jolene Purdy), a gas station clerk who receives a random call from Emily (Midori Francis), a nearly-blind woman who’s running from her murderous ex in the woods. Using a mobile phone and a Facetime-like app, Sam becomes Emily’s only chance for survival as she guides the terrified woman through a video call. Along the way, Sam’s phone runs out of batteries, and she steals one from a customer played by Pyle, who corners Sam and tries her damnedest to get her phone back.

Needless to say, Unseen was an interesting movie to shoot, since the conversation between Emily and Sam is what most of it rests on…but they two are never in the same room, and everyone in the film is responding to one side of a conversation, where they can’t possibly know what’s going on on the other end.

“[Francis and Purdy] were rehearsing together off-camera, so they did get to see one another, and responded to the emotion there,” Pyle told ComicBook, adding that ” Yoko Okumura crafted this incredible world with all these vibrant colors and I was really impressed by how it all came together.”

Pyle, who recently had roles on Z Nation, Impulse, and Y: The Last Man, compared the experience to working on a television show.

“On TV, you’re often in your own storyline, and obviously this was even more separated,” Pyle said. 

While Carol, the character played by Pyle, seems pretty monstrous from the outside — she doesn’t want to let someone borrow her phone, even though she is told in no uncertain terms that the phone is being used to save the life of someone in crisis — the actor says that there’s not really any malice on Carol’s part. She’s a damaged person who is acting out of a misguided sense of self-defense.

“Her pilot light went out for being a good person” after a hard life, Pyle explained. “Everyone like this I know, has been really deeply wounded.”

Pyle, who is set to appear in next month’s A Tourist’s Guide to Love on Netflix, is a prolific actor who has been working more or less nonstop since she was a teenager. Asked what attracts her to any given script, Pyle said that she sees enough that she gets to perform in a lot of really cool stuff, the answer to what makes her interested is pretty simple: it’s when she has time to do it.

“I was on a panel with Tim Curry, and someone asked him this same question,” Pyle told me. “He said, and it’s true, ‘I decide what jobs to take when someone offers me a job.’”

Unseen is now available on digital video on demand platforms.