Rob Reiner told Kathy Bates she would never win the Oscar for “Misery”

Kathy Bates gave a career-defining performance in Misery — and won an Oscar for it.

But both Bates and her director, Rob Reiner, were never sure that would be the outcome. In the film, based on the Stephen King novel of the same name, Bates stars as Annie Wilkes, the “number one fan” of romance author Paul Sheldon (James Caan), who saves him after a car wreck, only to jail and torture him.

Reiner always loved his leading lady’s performance. He doubted that the Academy would feel the same, considering that the Oscars rarely award genre films, particularly horror. Indeed, to date, Misery is the only Stephen King adaptation to be honored with an Oscar.

“You said, ‘You can campaign, but you’re not gonna get it,'” Bates told Reiner at the 16th edition of the TCM Classic Film Festival over the weekend. “You said because it’s a horror movie and not likely.”

“Then that night I just remember you standing there and you were like ‘Yeah, yeah'” Bates added, doing a series of fist pumps.

“Because you deserved it,” responded Reiner. “It’s an amazing performance.”

Before she won her Oscar and before the film was released, Bates feared that she’d killed her career before it’d even had a chance to begin (at least in the world of film and television). “I was horrified,” Bates recalled. “When we went to [watch it at the] screening room, my face just drained of color, and I was like ‘F—, man.’ I was out at the very end of a branch, and I could just hear the saw. I was like, ‘This is the end of my career.'”

For his part, Reiner never thought so. He was so confident in Bates’ performance that he cast her after only a few minutes of her audition. “She read like two lines, I think, two or three lines, and I said, ‘That’s enough, you can do this,'” Reiner said. “She was like, ‘What do you mean?’ I’m cutting her off. I’m like, ‘No, no you can do this, I know you can do it.'”

“And she went, ‘Really?'” he continued. “And as she walked out of the room, she said, ‘Can I call my mother?'”

Reiner was only too happy to give her the green light. From there, Reiner’s greatest concern was making sure Bates took care of herself through the filming process. “Kathy is such a dedicated actress,” he reflected. “And she was so focused on wanting to make this work, she would take the character home with her a lot of times.”

“I said to her, ‘You have to trust that you have one of the greatest acting instruments of all time and you can leave that character here at the studio and go home and be yourself, and don’t be worried that you won’t be able to pick it back up again,'” he said.

Now, however, Bates says that of all the characters she’s played in her storied career, she would name Annie Wilkes as the one closest to who she is as a person. “I get kind of manic, and I can get kind of down,” she said. “Do you know how sometimes how you can get obsessed with someone very talented?”

Bates wasn’t the only one to sense this connection. Four years before the movie even came out, one of her friends suggested that she would be perfect for Annie after they read the book.

Misery was presented at the TCM Classic Film Festival in celebration of its 35th anniversary.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly