Elizabeth went the extra mile for her new role (Picture: Paul Archuleta/FilmMagic)

The Haunting of Hill House was never going to be the most settling of jobs to take on for an actor – but Elizabeth Reaser has gone the extra mile.

Playing mortician Shirley Crain, Elizabeth made sure she was up to the task and has revealed that she learned to embalm dead bodies for her on-screen role.

Speaking to Metro.co.uk about her new past-time, she said: ‘When I agreed to do this I didn’t think about it in terms of actually doing it. As soon as I was cast they started sending me videos of people getting embalmed.

Shirley became a mortician to deal with her grief over Hill House (Picture: Netflix)

‘It was like a warning like, “be careful, prepare yourself”, and in fact I made my boyfriend sit down with me to watch them and he ran out of the room. He ran out! I was like “OK, this is what I’m doing”.’




Unfortunately for her, the extent of her research went beyond that of just watching video clips – and soon she was on set working with real cadavers.

‘I was putting my hands inside bodies and I worked with a mortician in Georgia, who plays my assistant on the show, Brittany. She had stories – and would tell me story after story about the things that she does, and its stories that you don’t want to know!’

The horrifying new series starts on Netflix on Friday (Picture: Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images)

She then joked that it could be her ‘next career move’ following her time on the show, with co-tar Oliver Jackson-Cohen, who plays her brother Luke, joking: ‘if anyone pops their clogs this afternoon, she’s ready!’

On the show, Shirley is the second eldest of five children, all of whom have been permanently affected by what they experienced during their time living in Hill House.

Twenty-five years later, they are forced to confront what happened to them and how it has shaped them as adults.

While eldest brother Steve turned their trauma into a best-selling book, Shirley channelled her grief into her work, and became a mortician.

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Her younger sister Theadora has become unwilling to get close to people, while the youngest twins Luke and Nell became a drug addict and a depressive with sleep paralysis.

‘Shirley is very clear-eyed and very strong, good person, who sort of gets up-ended by things from her past and it turns out is very broken in her own very specific way,’ Elizabeth explained.

The Haunting of Hill House is released in full on Netflix this Friday.

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