In cinemas this week, his new movie adapts Stephen King’s 1980 short story about two brothers (Perkins has a younger sibling, Elvis) and a cursed monkey toy, whose drum kit is a harbinger of death and misfortune, felling the people around them in wild and wacky ways.
I am an authority in losing people in insane ways’.” Nine years after the death of his famous father, his mother, the photographer and It-girl Berry Berenson, died on 11 September 2001, having been a passenger on American Airlines Flight 11 – the first of two planes to crash into the World Trade Center.
His debut, 2015’s The Blackcoat’s Daughter, cast Kiernan Shipka as a teenager at a Catholic boarding school turned satanic by the prophetic death of her parents; his second film, 2016’s I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, starred Ruth Wilson as a live-in aide who moves into the home of an author with dementia – searching for signs of who he was in the boxes he has left behind.
“He didn’t reflect me very much, so I think I was always going to be looking for a connection to my dad – and movies are a good place to look,” says Perkins, now 51.
He speaks to Annabel Nugent about grief, his mother’s tragic death on 9/11, and getting to know his famous father – ‘Psycho’ star Anthony – through his films.
