This week sees the release of Mother Mary, a psychosexual thriller about the fictional, titular electrogoth/pop star played against type by Anne Hathaway, whom Vogue has described in a movie review as entering her “Certified Weird-Girl Era.” But two women named Elyse and Larena Winn entered their weird-girl era 10 years ago, when the identical twins formed an electrogoth duo called… wait for it… Mothermary.
And while Mother Mary’s production company, A24, has insisted in a letter to Mothermary that the many uncanny similarities between Hathaway’s character and the sisters’ very real band — from the arty visuals, the crimson-and-gold latex costuming, and religious iconography, to the sound of the music itself — are a “complete coincidence,” the Winns aren’t so sure about that.
“When the first trailer came out, I had one of those moments where I was like, ‘I feel like I’m in an alternate reality,’” the duo’s Larena Winn, speaking via Zoom with her sister/bandmate Elyse, tells Gold Derby. “It was like, ‘Huh. That’s kind of weird, that the music is being done by FKA Twigs and Charli XCX. That’s our same genre, and it’s the same name…’”
“It definitely felt like we were on the mood board, or the inspiration for it,” Elyse adds with a rueful chuckle.
“It’s about an electropop artist who’s named Mother Mary and has blonde hair, and the music sounds so similar,” Larena continues. “And then visually, stylistically, it was just so odd that they went in the same direction — with the red veil, the femme goddess thing, the religious iconography but making it sexy and provocative and Gothic. That’s very specific direction to take it in as well.”
photos: Italians Do It Better/A24
“I mean, we had billboards around Los Angeles of us in red veils. We’ve toured with that veil. It’s been on billboards, photo shoots, music videos. I’ll leave it to the audience, but if you look at the billboard, it’s strikingly similar to the image of Anne Hathaway with the red mesh veil over her face,” Elyse points out. “Even the way they describe [the film’s music, which also features Jack Antonoff], they’re saying ‘ethereal, dark electropop’ — and when you Google us, that’s what the AI says about us.”
Mothermary, who are big FKA Twigs fans (“We’re proudly part of the religious deconstruction movement, and FKA Twigs is part of that movement; we love her,” Larena stresses), initially weren’t hugely concerned, or were even amused by the bizarre situation. “We were like, ‘Oh, they’re just taking anything that’s sacrilegious and edgy and flashy, and throwing it all together in one movie.’ And yeah, it looks fun, and in some ways it’s up our alley,” says Elyse. “And the thing is, none of it would’ve been a problem, because we really do believe that all art is a remix. No art is made in a vacuum. A lot of times I’m just flattered when I feel like maybe I was on a mood board. But the difference is when there’s going to be confusion in the marketplace.”
As hype for the film grew, confused followers indeed started to flood Mothermary’s DMs. “It was just fans constantly being like, ‘Is this movie about you?’ Or, ‘Oh my gosh, this looks like you.’ Or, ‘Are you guys doing this soundtrack? I’m so excited for you!’ It kind of felt like we didn’t get invited to the party that’s about us,” Elyse explains.
Assuming that the Mother Mary/Mothermary similarities really were entirely accidental, Larena says she and her sister “would have been OK with the crossover. It would’ve been way cooler, in my opinion, to have [the filmmakers] actually reach out and be like, ‘Hey, so there’s this crazy coincidence, but we think it’s funny. Let’s work together! It could be a whole thing!’ That would have been really rad, and I would have really respected that.” But she says the “nail in the coffin” was when Mothermary found out that the movie would be accompanied by a full soundtrack album — called Mother Mary: Greatest Hits.
The twins reacted to this news by pinning a playlist titled “MOTHERMARY GREATEST HITS” to their Spotify page, in a clever attempt to disrupt the algorithm. “What about our greatest hits? These are our greatest hits!” Larena laughs. But more seriously, her frustration is evident as she explains that this development could damage Mothermary’s career. “Just as a comparison, let’s imagine they were making a movie and they called it Madonna,” she says. “The movie is not about Madonna, but she does have blonde hair, and it’s ‘80s synthpop, and she’s a big pop star. Do you really think that they could [legally] release an album and call it Madonna: Greatest Hits?”
The Winns believe that the Mother Mary filmmakers were well aware of their band. The duo released their debut album, I Am Your God, in 2022, and their first single, an eerie cover of Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” that has garnered 1.4 million listens on Spotify, came out in 2019. Mothermary also released a new EP just last year. But they believe that because they’re not a major-label artist like Madonna, the studio’s powers-that-be simply assumed that the sisters wouldn’t fight back.
“I just really don’t think that no one ever typed in ‘Mother Mary’ into Google, like ‘Mother Mary music’ or ‘Mother Mary electropop’ or ‘Mother Mary pop,’ or any of those searches where we come up very easily,” says Larena. “I don’t know what happened. I’m not making any claims. But it seems extremely highly unlikely that they had no idea that we existed. I do think often what the industry does is they know that they have more power, more money, and lawyers on retainer — so, they’re just like, ‘It’s a cost of doing business. We want this thing, so they can fight it and we’ll just deal with it when the fight happens.’”
Mothermary have made a few viral social media posts about suing A24, and they say several lawyers have reached out to them and told them they have a case. But as of now, they have no plans to take the filmmakers to court. “We would get buried in legal fees,” Elyse sighs. “That could waste years of our life, and maybe we wouldn’t even have a career afterwards, because we’d have to focus all our time on a lawsuit. And we would rather have a career than have a lawsuit — way, way, way more.”
“We’ve been joking about suing from the beginning, just because it’s funny, and frankly, we enjoy joking about how crazy this is,” says Larena. “But do I actually want to spend the next four to five years in litigation with a billion-dollar company, when we just want to make music and make art?”
“We just want to make sure that they don’t bury us,” Elyse says. “We’re scared. We could be sued. We could be buried under all the SEO traffic of this movie. People could always associate us with a movie that might flop. Like, what if the movie’s horrible? What if it’s really embarrassing and people hate it, and then whenever people see our name, they’re like, ‘Oh, those are the artists from that movie that was terrible’? What if they say, ‘Wow, you guys are just copying Anne Hathaway’? The idea of that happening kills me.”
Some legal advisors have suggested that the band change their name, but they’ve never considered that — because, as Larena explains, the carefully chosen and deeply personal Mothermary moniker “embodies our message” and is a way for them to “reclaim our story.” And the ultimate irony is, Elyse and Larena Winn’s real-life story is probably more fascinating than anything Lowery or any other director could have come up with, and it truly deserves its own biopic.
The Winn twins, the two youngest of 11 children, were raised in what they call a “high-demand religion” or “full-blown cult” — Mormonism — in Missoula, Mont., and Larena was “forced into getting married” by her strict family when she was only 19 years old. “I’d had sex before marriage [with my then-boyfriend], which in Mormonism is next to murder,” Larena recalls. “So, as an indoctrinated teenager, they told me that basically I had to get married, or I was going to be publicly shamed and humiliated in front of my entire community.”
Meanwhile, Elyse, who was attending Brigham Young University, was still “very brainwashed and very afraid. … I read my scriptures every day. I got creepy-religious, spooky. I was writing religious songs. It got to a point where I was pretty much insane,” she confesses. “I kind of lost my marbles. I was crying all the time. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. And I was like, ‘Why am I so depressed if this [religion] is true?’”
Elyse then suffered a “mental break,” feeling like she was “ready to step in front of a bus,” and she dropped out of college and hitched a ride to Salt Lake City without telling her family. There, she “moved in with a bunch of ex-Mormons” and “kind of started over,” and after experiencing an epiphany and “overwhelming chills” while attending a Salt Lake City gay pride parade, she “went home and ripped up my Book of Mormon.”
Eventually, Elyse made her way to New York, where she taught herself how to produce records. “It reignited my love for music, just being able to produce it myself and have control over the entire sound,” she recalls. She began sending proto-Mothermary electronic tracks to Larena, who was then convinced to leave her husband and join Elyse in Bushwick, Brooklyn. The two then “started writing music together as a way to heal.”
“We were pressured in so many ways to believe that women were not innately holy, that we were sinners, that our only position in life, our only job, was to be mothers,” Larena says of their band name and backstory. “It’s hurtful when you’ve suffered abuse and traumatic experiences and you’re just trying to get [a message] out there, and then there’s this force, Hollywood or whatever, that’s like, ‘We’re going to take something that means a lot to you, and we don’t give a s— about you.’
“But it forced us to fight again,” Larena adds. “We’ve been through this before. We’ve been through a situation where we’re being told to shut up and don’t fight for yourselves and just be smaller, don’t make waves, don’t talk about it, don’t bitch and moan. We’ve been told all of this before in a religion that was patriarchal and controlled our lives, and we escaped that. And I think life really just continues to give you these repeated scenarios in which you get to grow again. So, one of the best things that has happened for us with this is we’ve always struggled to promote ourselves and tell our story, because it’s really scary and vulnerable; you get a lot of people who don’t believe you or say you’re bitching and moaning and should shut up. But now we have to fight for our name. We have to fight for our recognition, for our music. That’s always been hard for us. So, I think it’s cool that this [film] has made us be brave again.”
Mothermary also acknowledge another “silver lining”: that this Davey/Goliath saga might help them attract new audiences. “We’ve never asked anyone to speak up for us, but a lot of our fans genuinely got angry and started talking about this all over the internet, on Reddit, on Instagram, on TikTok. And what that’s done is, people love a controversy, so they read about it and they’re like, ‘Wait, I want to check Mothermary out,’” says Larena. “We’ve had a lot of people DM us saying, ‘Hey, I heard about what happened to you guys and I’m so sorry, but I listened to your music and I’m a fan now.’ And that’s amazing.”
Mothermary will attempt to make the most of this weird situation by releasing a new single, “Set Me on Fire,” on May 1 (the original release date was actually April 24, the day Mother Mary arrives in theaters, but they decided to move it so they didn’t confuse listeners even more or just seem petty). The duo’s second full-length album, Outer Darkness, will come out later this year.
“In continuing the fight, we’re going to go harder this year than ever before, so we don’t get lost in the sauce of everything. You’ll be seeing us on your timelines relentlessly,” Larena laughs. “So yeah, please support us — and go stream our greatest hits.”
This story originally ran on Gold Derby. Watch Elyse and Larena Winn’s full interview in the video at the top of this page.
