The secret’s out. Fresh off of his breakout star turn in the Emmy contending FX series Love Story, Paul Anthony Kelly is joining Sydney Sweeney in The Housemaid‘s Secret, the sequel to last year’s blockbuster thriller The Housemaid directed by Paul Feig and based on the bestseller by Freida McFadden. Already dated for Dec. 17, 2027, the movie is adapted from the second installment in the author’s Housemaid trilogy, and also stars Kirsten Dunst as Kelly’s onscreen wife.
Speaking with Gold Derby at the 2026 Nantucket Film Festival — where he received the Visionary Storyteller Tribute prize — Feig revealed some of the details behind casting Kelly in what will be his first feature film role. “There are a lot of interesting roles in the Housemaid sequel, and we needed a guy with a certain quality,” the director said. “I thought Paul was terrific in Love Story, and he had the right look and the right kind of attitude.
“When I met with him, we just really hit it off,” Feig continues. “He flew out to California, and did an audition with me. I worked with him on it, but he also brought his own take. I like anybody who brings something extra to a role. He’s a wonderful guy, and I’m really excited to work with him on it.”
The Housemaid’s Secret casts Kelly and Dunst as Douglas and Wendy Garrick, a pair of wealthy Manhattanites who welcome Sweeney’s Millie Calloway into their lush penthouse. But as in the previous film, something sinister lurks beneath the couples’ glamor, and it’s up to Millie to figure out what’s actually going on. Of course, having gone through her Housemaid experience with Nina and Andrew Winchester — played by Amanda Seyfried and Brandon Sklenar — she’s a little more savvy when it comes to deciding how to deal with men behaving badly.
The final moments of The Housemaid set up Millie’s continuing adventures with a Batman Begins-esque tease of her becoming a kind of avenging vigilante on behalf of wronged wives everywhere. Despite — or maybe because of — the outsized success of the first film, Feig admits that he took a beat before committing to the second installment, which will be written by Rebecca Sonnenshine who wrote the previous film.
“I don’t normally do sequels,” he notes, calling out Another Simple Plan as the only other Part 2 on his filmography. “You always want to make sure that you don’t just repeat the first movie, but Millie is a character that keeps moving forward and what I like about the second book is that it’s very different. You think it’s going to go in one direction and then it doesn’t. I’m always looking for that twist, that rug-pull while still featuring great characters and great character interactions.”
Feig says that he’ll be a full-time New York resident starting in August to prep for an October start date on shooting The Housemaid’s Secret. “We’re just cleaning up the script and casting the other roles right now,” he says.
Funnily enough, The Housemaid’s Secret is one of two sequels that Dunst will be starring in next year. She’s also set to appear in A Minecraft Movie Squared, the follow-up to last year’s hit video game adaptation directed by Jared Hess and starring Jack Black and Jason Momoa. In a recent interview, the actress joked about taking a break from smaller movies like The Power of the Dog and The Beguiled in pursuit of more commercial fare, saying: “Maybe I can just make a movie where I don’t lose money?”
That’s a sentiment that Feig understands. During an hour-long conversation at the NFF that preceded our interview, the writer-director spoke about wanting to make movies that appeal to a wide audience, and why he’s a fan of the test screening process in guaranteeing
“Especially if you’re doing a movie like The Housemaid that’s not straight-up comedy, you’ve gotta see how [people react],” he noted. “When I do my straight-up comedies we’ll do nine or 10 test screenings over the course of several months and just keep adjusting. Towards the end of the process we’ll even do a dual screening … one with the version we thought was set and one was the version where we put all the jokes in we thought were too dumb or weird. And then you find out that three or four of those jokes just destroyed, and so you put them in the final thing. Then you know you have a thing that works for 90 percent of the final audience — there’s always 10 percent that’s going to hate everything you do.”
“As an actor or director, you want to do your art projects, but you also want [commercial success],” he tells us candidly. “To me, it’s all part and parcel. I just talked to Kirsten and she’s having so much fun over in New Zealand making Minecraft. I’m very excited to get going on our film; Kirsten seems like a dream and Paul is lovely.”
