Annie Murphy is going full woo-woo for Nine Perfect Strangers

After six seasons as Alexis Rose on Schitt’s Creek, Annie Murphy knows the value of an ideal ensemble. See: her latest project, Nine Perfect Strangers, a Prime Video thriller about a psychedelic retreat co-starring icons like Nicole Kidman and Christine Baranski, who plays Murphy’s character’s mom. The series explores contemporary wellness culture: Kidman’s Masha is a mysterious, potentially malevolent guru figure. And it’s set in the Austrian Alps, which meant six months on location and plenty of field trips for beer and schnitzel. Here, Murphy shares her own woo-woo tendencies and why Toronto is a city you can trust.

This show ticks a lot of boxes: A-list cast, glamorous location, contemporary relevance. Was there a particular aspect that drew you to the project? First and foremost, it is exciting to get offered a job and then to find out that Murray Bartlett and Christine Baranski are attached to the project. One of the things I took away from my experience on Schitt’s Creek was how much I love the ensemble scenario, which gives you a lot of comfort as a performer and also this little community, like a little family, which is special. And to film in Europe was a real adventure. It really was a no-brainer.

Were you on location in Austria the whole time? We shot in Munich and Austria. Over the six-month shoot, most of us got to go home just once, so we really did become one another’s community and friend group. It was amazing. We travelled around to these wild, beautiful places, went for hikes, went for beer and schnitzel. We would dork out like a bunch of theatre nerds and talk about the scripts. It was fun, and we were well taken care of.

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Were you ever thinking, This is great, but The White Lotus shot on a beach in Thailand? I am one of those odd ducks who loves winter, loves a snowstorm. They wanted that full snow-globe effect, which is why we shot where we did, and then they got the warmest winter in decades. We got one incredible blizzard day, but mostly we were shooting in ski towns that had no snow. There are scenes where we’re in our big winter coats pretending to shiver and have our teeth chattering. They had to truck in snow from the tippy tops of some of the Alps.

Your character, Imogen, seems a little socially challenged. Did that appeal to you as an actor? My goal in acting is to play as many different characters as humanly possible, so in terms of roles, I look for different personalities. It’s so much fun to play a character like Imogen, who acts out in ways that I could never let myself in real life. Imogen is a really broken lady. She experienced a pretty significant trauma in her childhood and teenage years, and throughout her young adulthood she has just been desperately trying to fix herself through different types of therapy. I think she wants to feel safe and just to fit in, but she doesn’t know how to do that. The only thing she feels sure of is her intelligence. So she leads with that, which can come off as obnoxious and very know-it-all, which doesn’t tend to attract friends. And then, of course, Imogen has this fraught relationship with her mother, played by Christine, so we would get to do these really cruel, mean-spirited scenes and then go and have a glass of wine.

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That seems like it should be pretty high up on any actor’s bucket list: win an Oscar, fight on screen opposite Christine Baranski… Oh, definitely. Those are acting experiences that I will forever hold very dear.

Had you ever met Nicole Kidman before this project? I met her once at an awards show. She had watched Schitt’s Creek, so she came to say hi, and we were all quite stunned. I didn’t have a ton of time with her on this shoot. She’s very busy, so she came in, shot her stuff and went off to another wonderful project. Watching her work was mesmerizing: she would change things up on various takes, always trying something else out. There was an almost mysterious aura about her that was very fitting for her character.

The characters arrive at Zauberwald, which is this breathtaking spa in the Alps, and Imogen spends much of the first episode trying to find cell service. Would that be you? I like to think that, if I had signed up for such a colossally wild experience, I would try to be as present as humanly possible and really absorb as much as I could.

The show is about a wellness retreat, but it’s also a satire of contemporary wellness and New Age woo-woo. Do you have thoughts? I am such a huge advocate of talking about and dealing with mental health. Therapy, antidepressants, asking for help—all of those things are so important, and I think we’re seeing some of the stigma melt away, but as that’s happening you have a whole other scary world of shitty, greedy people trying to capitalize on people at their most vulnerable by offering up alternative treatments and fixes. In the show, we’re seeing a bunch of broken people being led into a scenario that may end up breaking them further—and breaking the bank.

Without getting into politics, the themes feel very timely. Yes. Say no more. I know exactly what you mean.

The kind of psychedelic therapy that Masha is offering is a buzzy topic these days. Is that something you have experimented with? I have never tried it. I was talking with Murray Bartlett, who has done ayahuasca a couple of times, and his version sounds very intriguing, but then I have other friends whose experiences sound totally horrific—like, no way. What is the most woo-woo thing you do on a regular basis? When I’m lying in bed at night, I do an energy body scan to try to relax myself and clear my mind of a million thoughts a minute. I also listened to the podcast The Telepathy Tapes recently, which really blew my mind. So probably the woo-woo-iest thing I do is obsess over that.

I know at one point you were living in Toronto. Is this still home? Yes, and gosh I love living in Canada. It’s where friends and family are, you can walk everywhere, all of the neighbourhoods have their unique vibes. LA strikes me as a bit suspicious, just how it’s sunny and beautiful all of the time.

So then it’s Torontonians you were talking about on Good Morning America recently, when you said that people still come up to you all the time asking you to do the “Ew, David” line from Schitt’s Creek? That’s actually everywhere I go at this point. In Toronto and the States but also internationally. A lot of people will ask to film me saying “Ew, David” and doing the Alexis hands, which is never a comfortable experience. I’ve realized, though, that what they actually want is to do it themselves, so that’s what I will encourage them to do, and they leave happy.

I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t ask you about the Schitt’s Creek reunion rumours. I swear this is not one of those things where I’m an actor who “can’t talk about my current projects”—I honestly don’t know anything. I would love to work with those loved ones of mine again.

I’m thinking the Rose family visits a psychedelic retreat? You know, there have been worse ideas. There have been way worse ideas.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.