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NEW YORK – The first time Sophie Thatcher had to scream for a living, she couldn’t do it.
The actress, then 11, had booked the lead in the musical “The Secret Garden” at a professional theatre in the Chicago suburbs. The director asked her to shriek. Nothing came out.
By the time she was the star of the 2023 Stephen King adaptation “The Boogeyman,” excuses weren’t going to cut it. To get it right, Thatcher locked herself in her mom’s basement and searched “Woman screaming” on YouTube. Thatcher, a singer as well as an actress, is very aware of her voice, so pushing such an unpleasant sound out of her body never became natural. As we sit at a small two-top in a crowded restaurant in January, she demonstrates her difficulty by singing “yell” rather than, well, yelling it.
While her short but spooky filmography might suggest otherwise, the 24-year-old Thatcher isn’t really a scream queen. She’s more like the raven on your windowsill or the black cat crossing your path. Whether she’s a stranded soccer player turned cannibal in “Yellowjackets” (returning for a third season on Paramount Plus with Showtime on Friday), a Mormon missionary fleeing a deadly trap in “Heretic” (a horror hit last year) or an android rebelling against her programming in “Companion” (a well-received thriller last month), Thatcher’s presence is usually an omen that things are about to get grisly. Her characters just don’t usually scream about it.
And her vibe – sardonic, a little haunted in a Victorian way – doesn’t scream “victim” in the slightest.
“I don’t like the term scream queen,” explains Thatcher, who has often been called one. Instead, she’s tended to portray complex genre characters who defy our assumptions about who lacks, and takes, control, even when things get very bloody.
Thatcher, fresh from a photo shoot, slowly sips her white wine over drinks in Lower Manhattan, looking fashionable in two coats, one of which could’ve come from a David Lynch set. Thatcher, who puts her hands over her heart when Lynch’s name is mentioned, says that the influential director of “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Drive,” who died in January, informed her style and tastes: “Growing up, it felt like he stood for the outsiders.”
“Yellowjackets” has more than a touch of Lynch to it. The time-hopping series stars Thatcher, Sophie Nélisse, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Samantha Hanratty and Courtney Eaton as the primary figures in a group of teenage athletes who survive a plane crash and resort to violent means – while worshiping an unseen force – to survive in the Canadian woods. A murderer’s row of Gen X veterans – including Melanie Lynskey, Juliette Lewis, Christina Ricci and more – play the characters as adults.
The rough-edged Natalie is the loner of the group, with a tough home life and a history of drug use. In the woods, the other girls explode while Natalie contains her feelings like hot coals in her chest. After the surviving team members are rescued, the adult Natalie leans heavily on narcotics and alcohol to cope. “She holds onto her guilt,” Thatcher says of her character, a punk whom she plays as boiling with just-contained anger. “She stores it, whereas the other girls find ways to let go of it or distract or forgive themselves.”
The Season 2 finale saw – big spoiler alert – Natalie die in the current timeline, accidentally killed by her overbearing friend Misty (Ricci). It flips everything for the still-living Natalie that Thatcher plays in the past timeline. “It does feel empty without her,” Thatcher says of Lewis’s version of Natalie. “There’s something so beautifully unhinged about her” in the role.
As the events of “Yellowjackets” spiral into unbridled teenage chaos, Natalie clings to her ethics. “From the very beginning we talked about Natalie as the moral center of the show,” co-creator Ashley Lyle says. “She has an incredibly strong sense of what she believes to be right and wrong. Sophie brings that so specifically but also brings herself to the character.”
With Season 3, “it’s sad because I feel like (Natalie) was already doomed,” says Thatcher. “There was also something equally as tragic seeing where she turns up, because I feel like this season, the first two episodes – this is probably the best you get to see Natalie. … It sounds weird but I’m so proud of her as a character because she remains good.” As the new season begins, she’s in a position of power, responsible for managing both the logistics and interpersonal squabbles of a horde of teenage girls – of the group, but outside the clique.
“It’s interesting the way our group dynamic plays out. I feel like we’re all kind of our characters,” Thatcher says. “There are a lot of friend groups. I’m the only one, at least this season, [who] didn’t really hang out with people. Naturally, I think I tend to be more of a loner.” Besides, she says, “I don’t really hang out with actors. I don’t really like talking about it in my free time. I like talking about movies. Everyone I’m friends with loves to talk about movies. But when it becomes the technical acting side of it, then it’s competitive and weird. … I like having that separate.”
Going into the show, Thatcher was worried about matching the emotive Lewis’s intensity; the showrunners were not. They knew she could handle it three or four seconds into her taped audition, which she filmed in Chicago before the pandemic. “Yellowjackets” co-creator Bart Nickerson likens the Natalie character to the odd and intuitive Dale Cooper from Lynch’s “Twin Peaks.” “Natalie, to a certain extent, feels the world in a way that I kind of recognized and Sophie very much embodies that,” he says. Lyle sums up Thatcher differently: “She’s a f—ing weirdo and I mean that in absolutely the best possible way.”
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Thatcher grew up seeing her older sister perform in Sondheim shows (“I still really look up to her”) and had one of her first roles as Emily Webb in “Our Town,” which she booked alongside her twin sister Ellie. “We would go on different nights and I don’t think anybody noticed,” she says.
Like many Gen Zers, she grew up a “Twilight” fan – Team Jacob, if anyone’s asking, but grew to prefer brooding Edward over the famously well-abbed werewolf. “There’s a level of self-awareness going Team Edward,” she said. “It’s just growing up.” After two years of high school, she switched to home schooling as she worked on her craft. Like her “Yellowjackets” character, she kept her circle small. “Growing up, I could only make friends with people who were like, ‘I love My Bloody Valentine’ or something alt,” she jokes.
As a teen she appeared in short films and had some small roles on TV before starring in the 2018 sci-fi thriller film “Prospect” alongside Pedro Pascal. After the first season of “Yellowjackets” aired in 2021, more projects came rushing in: “The Boogeyman,” “Heretic” and “Companion.”
“Heretic” follows two Mormon missionaries (Thatcher and Chloe East) who enter the home of a prospective convert (Hugh Grant) only to be caught in his sadistic web. For Thatcher, a former Mormon herself, the press tour for the film felt like doing “reverse therapy.” Her mother, who still is in the church, was supportive of Thatcher tackling the role. She sent her daughter a text a few weeks before the film’s release, asking, “Now I’m scared to go to the lord. I don’t have to be scared, do I?” Thatcher replied, “No.”
“Companion” shows off a different side – well, sides – of Thatcher. Her character, Iris, is the perfect girlfriend: styled straight out of the late ’50s and early ’60s with light pastels and quirky patterns, desperately in love with her boyfriend Josh (Jack Quaid). She sleeps on command and can have her settings changed to speak different languages. She’s a sex robot.
The first half of the film, set in a secluded cabin, leaves us waiting for the proverbial Mary Jane heel to drop. In the first act, Thatcher plays the dutiful girlfriend bot; as she gains consciousness in the second half, she achieves her blood-soaked final girl form. For Thatcher, the emotional shift was heightened by having to stop shooting during the 2023 writers and actors strikes. Thatcher did “Heretic” (which got a waiver from the actors union) during this time, and her confidence grew in a way that mirrors Iris’s.
“Companion” director Drew Hancock calls Thatcher a movie star in the making, singling out how she invented a way of walking for her role that felt just off-putting enough for viewers to notice something was up.
“I remember the first take. I was like, ‘Sophie walks really weird.’ I was convinced that she just didn’t know how to walk,” Hancock says. A few moments later it came to him: “Wait a minute, what am I talking about? This is all intention. She planned this? That’s how good she is.”
For the role, “They pitched to me ‘Britney Spears girl next door,’” Thatcher says, “and I was like, ‘You didn’t cast me for that.’” So she created a Pinterest board with her vision for the character – girly, demure, retro. That’s who we see in the film.
In both “Heretic” and “Companion,” her voice either bookends or sets the stage for the film. It’s soft and silky and just the right amount of haunted. Thatcher, who released her first EP “Pivot & Scrape” in 2024, wants to further integrate herself into the stories she’s telling by pairing her acting with her true passion, music. “Music is my first love and acting is something that I happen to be good at,” she says. Now, her goal is to be a part of the soundtrack of every movie she is in.
Thatcher is always searching for more – more ways to grow with her characters, more ways to participate in the filmmaking process and more roles with all-consuming emotional peaks. She finds footing through music and describes her aims by quoting a Fiona Apple lyric: “I just want to feel everything.”
“That’s the core of why I’m doing this,” she says.