In her early 20s, Sophie Thatcher spent every birthday screaming, sobbing, or singing. She turned 22 while hoisting a fake moose carcass across a frozen lake on season two of Showtime’s Yellowjackets. On her 23rd birthday, she delivered an impassioned monologue to Hugh Grant on the set of A24’s Heretic, now in theaters. Thatcher celebrated her 24th earlier this year surrounded by friends at a karaoke bar, belting out her go-to track, the Carpenters’ “Close to You.”
“I did karaoke last night. Swear to God, it is my favorite thing. As soon as you meet me, you just learn that,” Thatcher tells Vanity Fair between sips of a La Croix from her home in Nichols Canyon, Los Angeles. “I’m really trying to spice it up, ’cause I can see people getting sick of me singing [‘Close to You’]. But I sound great because I’ve worked so hard on it.”
When she’s not crooning about starlight and sprinkled moon dust, Thatcher honors her musical theater roots. She’s a fan of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd (“I watched that movie as a kid, and kind of based my aesthetic off of that”) and Company, whose eleven o’clock number, “Being Alive,” has become another late-night staple for her. After she shares her love for old jazz standards, I tell Thatcher she should play Cabaret’s wounded heroine, Sally Bowles. “I auditioned for the West End [production]. I was going to do it,” she says, eyes casting downward. “I’m not going to go into it. But in the future? Absolute dream role. I have time, I’m definitely on the younger side. There’s something interesting when she’s older and jaded.”
Speaking of being jaded: Thatcher and I were originally meant to speak right after the presidential election, a conversation that we mutually agreed to postpone after Donald Trump’s win. “That felt like not the best time to talk about myself,” she says two days later. “It felt like a day to grieve. It’s so self-indulgent to talk about, [but] I hope the movie makes an impact in some way. It gets people thinking, and what’s really satisfying about my job is that I’m choosing movies that actually have a lot of messages. I have to remind myself [of] that. But Wednesday, I woke up just like, oh, shit. We’re back to zero.”
For a while, all new art may be viewed through a postelection haze—but there really is something alarmingly resonant about Heretic, in which two Mormon missionaries (Thatcher is Sister Barnes; Chloe East is Sister Paxton) attempt to baptize a mysterious man named Mr. Reed (played by Grant), who traps them in a makeshift temple so that he can demonically mansplain religion. “The first time I watched it, I felt really anxious, doomed and existential,” says Thatcher. “Then last time I watched it with my family, I felt really hopeful. That was the first time I cried—I think because I didn’t have to do a Q&A [afterward],” she adds with a laugh.
Thatcher, who was raised as a Mormon in Chicago, left the church over 10 years ago—right around the time she started acting professionally. She says she clicked immediately with East, who was also raised in the faith, and leaned into being naturally unnerved around the ever-charismatic Grant. “With Hugh, I was intimidated, and I think that worked. He’s a very grounded, hilarious, charming, incredibly smart guy,” says Thatcher. She created a Pinterest board and playlist for Sister Barnes, whose doubts about religion swim in the pools of her blue eyes, and—at the request of directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods—wrote an extended backstory for her character as well.
Some of Sister Barnes’s history, particularly the character’s rigid physicality, came from Thatcher’s own past with the church. “There’s a tenseness,” she says, “a feeling of wanting to please. I had that when I was younger, in the church. It was a lot of specific things that kept being brought back, just little tense ticks that maybe didn’t fully make it in the movie, but got me into that headspace.”
She didn’t hesitate to delve back into her “very liberal Mormon background” for the role—but Thatcher also didn’t want the film to disrespect her mother, who still attends church and plans on seeing the film with members of her ward. Though Mormons “are always the butt of the joke,” says Thatcher, she has maintained affection for the people with whom she once worshiped. “Once you’re in that community, they’re very loving and very giving,” she explains. “Even when I left the church, it was always flowers, cookies—just a lot of kindness.” Thatcher has a sense of humor about it all too. “Growing up, people would ask me, ‘What is Mormonism?’ And I was like, ‘Watch the South Park episode. It’s actually pretty good.’”
That said, Thatcher’s steering clear of Mormonism’s current reality TV wave, which led to Whitney Leavitt and Whitney Rose—from Hulu’s The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives and Bravo’s Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, respectively—hosting Utah-based screenings of Heretic. “I need a month of not thinking about Mormonism, because I’ve never talked about it so much in my life,” says Thatcher. “I wasn’t even that invested when I was in church, ’cause I always had something else going on. It really feels like I’m going back to when I was a child, even doing these interviews.”
Nevertheless, negotiating her release from Grant’s chunky-sweatered madman proved to be “very therapeutic” in exorcising some pent-up feelings. “Every movie I’ve chosen somehow feels like an emotional release,” says Thatcher, who after turns in The Book of Boba Fett and MaXXXine, next stars in the horror film Companion opposite Jack Quaid. “Yellowjackets is harder, because Natalie has so many demons. It’s hard to tap into that and then get out of it. Especially this season,” she continues. “I feel so much anger with the state of the world right now, so it’s nice to be able to release and stand up for yourself—even if it’s not you.”
Thatcher entered the upcoming third season of Yellowjackets as a lone wolf. Her adult-aged counterpart, played by Juliette Lewis, was killed off in the show’s season two finale—a reality that became abundantly clear when Thatcher went to shoot photos featured in Vanity Fair’s first look at the new episodes, which feature the rest of her castmates posing with the actors who play the present-day versions of their characters. “On the day, they were like, well, we weren’t going to have you for this, but do you want to do it?” Thatcher recalls with sadness. “Of course I want to do it! I’m a part of the cast.”
While she tries to stay away from comments sections, Thatcher couldn’t resist peeking as people reacted in devastated fashion to her character’s solo shot, juxtaposed against the joint photographs of duos like Melanie Lynskey and Sophie Nélisse. “I was going through every comment and everyone’s like, Natalie!” Thatcher recalls with a cry. “I think it resonated. It sets people up for the season, ’cause it gets really dark. You get to see more of my Natalie. It makes me really emotional. People really feel for my character. I love my character more than anything in the world, and I don’t know if I’ll ever feel this again. There was a point toward the end of the season where I would talk about Natalie and just start crying. I’m so protective of her, and that just makes for a really beautiful, intense experience.”
Thatcher says she had a different kind of autonomy over Natalie in the third season, given that her performance was no longer tethered to another performer. “I felt less pressure to match [Lewis’s] voice, because that was always in my head. Once you read praise, like, oh, their voices are so similar, I just got too self-aware,” she says. “Season two, it got in the way of me being present because I was so keen on just matching everything. But this season there’s a freedom where I could be present in the scene and know that Natalie is in me at this point.”
Still, “I really miss Juliette,” says Thatcher. “It makes me so sad.” While they may no longer have each other as professional partners, the two share an irrevocable bond after two seasons spent playing the same character in different decades. “Any interaction with her is very sacred. Sharing a character is the most vulnerable thing possible,” says Thatcher of Lewis. “I’ll never have that connection again, ’cause it’s so rare that you get to have this as an actor. She’s just a really big inspiration for me.”
Thatcher’s musical career, which includes her recent EP Pivot & Scrape, as well as a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” that plays during Heretic’s end credits, has also helped her establish an identity separate from that of her TV counterpart. “It’s so weird to have people recognize me for this character and think I am this character,” she says. “But then to put out music and feel artistically satisfied in that makes me feel like a whole person. Sometimes you feel like half a person when you’re perceived by the public.”
As for being a creative person during a period of uncertainty, Thatcher seems to be following an old adage from Carrie Fisher: “Take your broken heart, make it into art.”
“I want to keep making stuff,” she says plainly. “I’m never going to be satisfied—but that’s what keeps me driving. I feel happy that people feel seen from watching me or listening to my music. I want to make people feel emotional. It’s the biggest compliment: ‘You made me cry.’ That’s all I want.” Thatcher lets out a knowing laugh. “I just want to make people cry.”
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The post Sophie Thatcher Is All the Rage: On Heretic, Yellowjackets, and Making Art Out of a Broken Heart appeared first on Vanity Fair.
