Glenn Close ‘Had No Clue’ How to Play a ‘White Woman’ Who ‘Lived Her Life in the Black Community’ in The Deliverance

Glenn Close’s favorite roles? The ones she has “no clue” how to play at first. 

“If I have any rule that I've tried to hold myself to,” the 77-year-old screen legend tells PEOPLE, it’s “never to repeat myself” from one character to the next. 

“Just for my own sake,” she says with a laugh. Playing the same type of woman more than once, she adds, “I think I'd get bored.”

So when director Lee Daniels approached Close with his new horror drama The Deliverance (co-written by David Coggeshall and Elijah Bynum) and she “had no clue of how to play it,” she was thrilled. 

“Alberta is a white woman who has lived her life in the Black community and she's only dated Black men,” the eight-time Oscar nominee explains. The character is also “a woman who has been abused and I think she has become an abuser. She has found God in a very real way, and she's hoping that her daughter will be able to clean up as well.”

Playing her onscreen daughter, Ebony, is The United States vs. Billie Holiday star Andra Day. The Deliverance follows Ebony’s journey to hold her Pennsylvania family together as they face financial struggles, a social worker (played by Mo'Nique) ready to call Child Protective Services and — spoiler alert — what turns out to be a demon living in their house and possessing the children (Caleb McLaughlin, Demi Singleton and Anthony B. Jenkins). 

As an ailing cancer patient, Alberta also dons a variety of flashy wigs for chemotherapy treatments — where she flirts with nurses. “When [Daniels] told me that there are white women like this in every Black community,” recalls Close, “I was intrigued and I wanted to do her justice. And so the journey began.”

She adds that Daniels informed her that “every Black person knows a white woman like this, but not every white person knows a white woman like this!”

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Speaking with PEOPLE, Day, 39, said she admires her onscreen mother: "The way she embodied this character and the way — watching her, she's so legendary and she's been doing this to the highest level for such a long time."

The two costars developed a “deeper kinship,” Day added. “We could do what we needed to do for the scenes where we're just beefing and there's so much anger and pain. But we needed that love and we absolutely have it."

“There's this huge tension between mother-daughter in this film, which basically is based on their ultimate love for each other. But life has been hard for them,” says Close. 

“Parents will always make mistakes in raising their children, and it's just a question of how bad the mistakes are. And they can see that and they can be sorry for it and ask for forgiveness, but it's really the burden of forgiveness is on the child.”

The Deliverance is in theaters now and on Netflix Aug. 30.