Sophie Thatcher Lenka Ulrichova Logo text Sophie Thatcher bought the first house she looked at.
She was living in Nichols Canyon at the time, scrolling real estate listings online, when it caught her eye: an 1850s farmhouse 2500 miles from Los Angeles, in upstate New York, a part of the country where the only weekend grosses anybody cares about are measured in bushels at the local apple orchard.
So, she hopped on a plane, toured the property, decided on the spot that it was her “dream house,” and moved in with her twin sister, her sister’s boyfriend and her own boyfriend — a domestic arrangement Thatcher freely admits is “kind of weird.”
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“I’m sometimes impulsive,” the 25-year-old actress tells The Hollywood Reporter during a Zoom call from inside the house, where she has spent the past three days making music (she put out an EP last year) after just wrapping filming on the final season of Yellowjackets, the hit Showtime series on which she’s spent much of her 20s playing Juliette Lewis’ younger, punkier self. “But I couldn’t do L.A. anymore. It felt like I couldn’t escape the industry. Like I was surrounded by billboards of actors that I knew. This feels like it couldn’t be further away. This feels like I’ve built my own fantasy world.”
She’s been doing a lot of that lately — although not all those fantasy worlds come with listings on Zillow.
Last week, she opened Her Private Hell, Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn’s lavish, largely inscrutable arthouse thriller in which Thatcher portrays a troubled young starlet stuck in a futuristic, fog-filled metropolis that’s being stalked by a shadowy serial killer called the Leatherman. Critics have praised Thatcher’s intense performance, admired the film’s dreamscape imagery, and debated whether the movie is a masterpiece of metaphoric storytelling or merely an exquisitely lit endurance test with no discernible plot.
Sophie Thatcher. Jacket and skirt: McQueen. Earrings: completedworks. Photograph by Lenka Ulrichova Thatcher has no such ambivalence. She gushes over the film’s hypnotic visuals and haunting Pino Donaggio score, calling her three months on the set in Copenhagen the “most artistically satisfying experience” of her career.
“It almost felt like something other than acting,” she says. “Like some weird version of performance art.”
Some young actors plan their careers as cautiously as they curate their Insta feeds. Every role is another data point in the stardom algorithm. But Thatcher seems to be taking a different path. She’s spent the last few years wandering from one strange, off-kilter project to the next. Films like Heretic, the 2024 theological thriller in which she starred opposite Hugh Grant as a Mormon missionary kidnapped by a soft-spoken sociopath, and Companion, an overlooked 2025 AI thriller in which she played Jack Quaid’s murderous robot girlfriend. And now, Her Private Hell, a film so confounding one critic wryly re-titled it “Our Public Anguish” — yet still capable of earning Thatcher a 12-minute standing ovation when it premiered at Cannes in May.
Meet the anti-ingenue. Not America’s sweetheart — America’s slightly unnerving art-school girlfriend.
“I just want to see more weird people like me on screen,” she says, twirling a lock of shaggy hair. “I want to be a voice for outsiders.”
Sophie Thatcher. Photograph by Lenka Ulrichova She isn’t 100 percent sure, but she believes her first stage appearance might have been as a munchkin in a community theater production of The Wizard of Oz. “I think I was probably 4 years old,” she says. “But my first professional acting was in The Secret Garden at this theater in Evanston. I was 10 years old. But I was 10 going on 30.”
By the time she was 12, Thatcher was starting to spend nearly as much time on stage as in school, landing roles in Chicago productions of Our Town, Oliver!, Seussical and even the lead in The Diary of Anne Frank at the prestigious Writers Theatre. It made for an exhilarating, if somewhat awkward childhood.
“I grew up with these older women in dressing rooms,” she says of her upbringing on the shores of Lake Michigan. “I was so interested in their stories and hearing about their marriages, I couldn’t connect with anybody at school. School was boring. Kids my age were boring.”
She wasn’t all that crazy about church either. Her parents raised her and her two sisters as Mormons. But Thatcher left the faith at around 12 — about the same time her father, a lawyer, and mother, a piano teacher, divorced — preferring to spend her Sundays on stage doing matinees. “The Church was always about finding a husband, going on a mission,” she says. “I felt restricted and pressured. It felt wrong.”
Her first big-screen break came at 17, when Thatcher auditioned for a lead in a scrappy sci-fi indie called Prospect. She flew with her mother to Seattle for a chemistry read opposite one of its costars — some then-unknown actor named Pedro Pascal — and walked out convinced she’d blown it. “I was sobbing,” she recalls. An hour later, she got the call that she’d landed the part.
Sophie Thatcher. Dress: Rodarte. Photograph by Lenka Ulrichova But, of course, the role that really put Thatcher on the map was Natalie in Yellowjackets, the chain-smoking teenage troublemaker who, after a plane crash in the show’s flashback segments, ends up marooned in the Canadian wilderness with the rest of her high school girls’ soccer team (who resorted to cannibalism to survive). It was a physically demanding part, involving much running, fighting, hunting, climbing and occasional retching. But it was also character building, in the most literal sense of the words.
“Natalie is me,” she says of the years she spent scavenging in the woods. “She shaped my twenties. She helped me gain confidence. The hardest part of leaving that show is that I’ve never felt so much love for a character.”
Thatcher was cast in Yellowjackets before Lewis, who portrays Natalie as an adult in the show’s contemporary timeline. Still, Thatcher took her cues from her elder — or at least she did until Lewis left the series after season two in a major tragic plot twist. “I have a lower voice — I talk like I’m talking now — but I was doing Juliette, for sure,” she says of the vocal work she put into the character. “But Juliette and I have similar spirits, so it was hard carrying the character alone after she left.”
Not surprisingly, Yellowjackets kicked open a lot of doors for Thatcher, but she didn’t always go for predictable choices. Sure, she dabbled in franchise material, playing a cybernetically enhanced bike-gang leader in three divisive episodes of The Book of Boba Fett (“Star Wars fans are very passionate,” is all she’ll say about the online backlash to the Disney + series, which seemed to focus mostly on the fact that it had Thatcher zipping around Tatooine on a scooter that looked too much like a Vespa). Also, in retrospect, maybe 2023’s The Boogeyman was not the most propitious vehicle for Thatcher’s considerable talents — even if it did provide her with her first opportunity to carry a feature as its above-the-title star.
More recently, though, Thatcher has started popping up in offbeat projects like Heretic, a big-screen exegesis on theological metaphysics that unfolds like a jump-scare horror flick. Not surprisingly, playing a Mormon missionary, even one being psychologically tortured by a creepy English recluse, was not a huge stretch for Thatcher. “It was me with a different name,” she says of the part. “Like it was a version of me if I’d stayed in the Church.”
Thatcher. Photograph by Lenka Ulrichova Her role in Companion, a slyly subversive sci-fi thriller that’s as much about toxic relationships as it is killer fem-bots, was more challenging. Playing a sunny cybernetic girlfriend who goes haywire when her boyfriend tries to shut her down required Thatcher to tap into reserves of normalcy she wasn’t sure she possessed. “Initially, I thought the role was too girl next door,” she says. “I was like, ‘I just can’t see myself in that.’” She changed her mind only when she started thinking of her android character as somehow French New Wave. “She’s timeless,” she says. “I love that about her.”
Now, though, with Her Private Hell, Thatcher has embarked on an even higher plane of strange. Indeed, with Refn’s latest foray into avant-garde cinema — the director’s first feature in ten years, since his head-scratching 2016 thriller The Neon Demon —she’s entered a Twilight Zone-like dimension not just of sight and sound, but of heavily gelled lighting, hypnotically long takes, overworked fog machines, and glacially paced plotlines.
“It was the most surreal experience of my life,” Thatcher says of making the film. “It felt like a dream. Like I was living in a dream. Like I entered some trance-like state.”
Refn is known to be a challenging director to work with — he shoots in chronological order, is constantly changing his endings, and admits to treating his actors like “props” on his elaborately designed doll-house-style sets. “It takes an enormous amount of trust and confidence to strip away all your protective shields and take this journey,” he describes his directing style to THR, noting that Thatcher is “a very intuitive person” who is “emotionally supercharged” and “blessed with the gift of being a magnet for the camera.” That quality, he adds, “is what movie stars are made of.”
Indeed, Refn’s only issue with the actress was that she sometimes found it difficult to stand still — for 15 takes. “Being still was something very new to her,” he notes. “And forcing multiple takes of stillness was really draining her. But I think she also saw the beauty in less is more — and none is everything.”
And less than none is presumably the plot of Refn’s next film. In any case, there doesn’t seem much danger of Thatcher suddenly shifting gears and signing on for a Marvel movie. Up next is Babadook director Jennifer Kent’s long-awaited adaptation of The Girl Who Was Plugged In, followed by Peaches, another defiantly offbeat indie. She’s hoping to make another record at some point, as well — “music is my number one,” she says — and eventually maybe try her hand at directing.
Meantime, home is this farmhouse in upstate New York, where she and her twin sister, a stop-motion animator, and their respective boyfriends share space with whatever guitars, keyboards and recording gear happen to be scattered around. Her own boyfriend, whom she met in New York, isn’t in the business, let alone on any billboards, which is just the way Thatcher likes it. When she’s working on a script, she says, smiling, he’ll sometimes wander by to ask if she’s “going over her slides.”
Over the past five years, she’s survived a plane crash, plumbed the mind of a killer robot, been kidnapped by Hugh Grant, and now made it out alive from under a nearly two-hour Danish art film. Whatever plan she’s following is definitely working — even if the plan is to have no plan.
“I think I’ve gotten this far because I’ve been doing my own thing,” Thatcher says before resuming her life in her fantasy world on the Hudson. “I’m very confident in what I do. I’m not trying to fit into anyone else’s box.”
Thatcher. White top: Miu Miu. Styling: Turner Turner. Hair: Ericka Verrett. Makeup: Robert Rumsey. Photographed at The Cyc Ward. Photograph by Lenka Ulrichova THR Newsletters
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