Sophie Thatcher On ‘Yellowjackets,’ ‘Scream Queen’ Label & New Music

“I’m probably less moody than people think,” Sophie Thatcher tells me. This is the Sophie Thatcher who plays a hardened teenage castaway-turned-cannibal in Yellowjackets, cable’s gnarliest show. The same Thatcher who played a devout missionary caught in a twisted test of fate in last year’s religious horror Heretic. Who survived a bloody cat-and-mouse game in January’s Companion to become sci-fi’s reigning Final Girl.

But that’s the Hollywood version of Thatcher. In real life, she’s nothing like what her IMDb page would suggest. I first met Thatcher over a year ago at an admittedly stuffy fashion dinner, where she was my table’s designated brand-dressed celebrity. Instead of retreating into her phone, as many in that role do, Thatcher treated it like a girls night: We giggled over the comically small vegetarian option, shared pictures of our boyfriends, and compared our respective Elliott Smith tattoos. Much to my surprise, she was downright… bubbly?

“Bubbly, yeah — people don’t expect that,” she says. “Obviously, I’m attracted to darker things. It feels cathartic going to dark places, because it feels like a release. It almost feels healthy, because you go let it out in your job and then go home and be a normal human being, hopefully.”

When we connect again on Zoom, it’s Valentine’s Day and premiere day for Season 3 of Yellowjackets. A storm had briefly knocked the Wi-Fi out of Thatcher’s Los Angeles apartment, pushing our interview back slightly and, more crucially, allowing Thatcher a few extra hours of sleep after the previous night’s launch party. “That was especially fun last night doing glam [when the power went out],” she says. “Half of my hair was curled, so we had to just pin everything up and do it the old-fashioned way. It actually felt very Victorian. And it felt very Yellowjackets.”

Yellowjackets was a surprise pandemic hit, a dual-timeline story about a high school girls soccer team whose plane crashes in the wilderness and their grown-up selves still dealing with the dark secrets of their survival. Thatcher’s Natalie, portrayed as an adult by Juliette Lewis, comes with all the hallmarks of a, well, Juliette Lewis type: wary, smart-mouthed, and brash. And now, nearly six years after booking the role, Thatcher has finally settled into it.

“I definitely felt less pressure, but going into Season 2 was pretty brutal,” she says. “I think everyone was just stressed out, because it was getting such good reviews. People really loved it. Recreating that magic in a naturalistic way is almost impossible.”

“Doing comedy is the most vulnerable, scary thing, because if you don’t pull it off, then you’re f*cked.”

Even the long break between the second and third seasons — a result of the 2023 screenwriters and actors strikes — couldn’t disrupt the cast’s dynamic. “Anytime we all come together, it is an innate feeling of us being a family,” Thatcher says. “I know every ensemble TV show is like ‘We’re a family’ for press reasons, but I do actually strongly believe that.”

She was just 19 when she filmed the pilot — the youngest of her costars. “It felt very teenage the first season, where it was just all of us hanging out, getting drunk in the hotel rooms,” she continues. “I give credit to Ella Purnell. She was the ringleader, like her character, in that sense; she brought people together. We would all go to Steven Krueger’s house and just drink a lot of White Claw. I do miss that part. Now we’re three seasons in. It is a job, but I love everybody so dearly, and when you see them, it feels like no time has passed.”

She’s now eager to establish an identity outside of the show. “I don’t want to just be known for Yellowjackets,” she says. After Heretic and Companion — along with a starring role in 2023’s The Boogeyman and a small part in last year’s MaXXXine — movie fans are hailing her as Hollywood’s new Scream Queen. Thatcher has mixed feelings about it. “It’s a great, iconic title, but I just hate being put in a box,” she says. “I know that people are catching on to me being bothered [by it].”

“This is so corny, but I went to an Animal Collective show when I was 16, and I was like, ‘Whoa, music can sound like this?’”

The way she sees it, these are all very different movies. “Heretic is about theology, and Companion is actually very human. It’s not just jump scares.” Plus, genre has never been a huge factor in how she picks roles anyway. “I just want to work with directors that I admire, and I want to get as weird as humanly possible in movies, challenge myself, and learn new things about myself that I didn’t think I could do,” she continues. “With Companion, I went in thinking I wasn’t going to be able to do it, and I did it, so I just want to keep chasing that feeling.”

Thatcher tells me she’d like to give comedy a try — she loves the “artistic but absurdist” work of Tim Robinson and Nathan Fielder. “Doing comedy is the most vulnerable, scary thing, because there’s always the fear: There’s so much on the line, and if you don’t pull it off, then you’re f*cked,” she says. But choosing a direction feels high stakes: “I’m in a kind of fragile place in my career right now, where I want to be really picky.”

Thankfully, she has another creative outlet: music. “I know exactly what I want with music, whereas with acting, I’m still figuring it out and I still don’t have a full say yet,” Thatcher says. Last year, she released Pivot & Scrape, her debut EP of atmospheric alt-rock. (Though there was her teenage Soundcloud era, featuring Radiohead covers and “a picture of me in my bedroom, trying to look like Effy from Skins,” she says. “You might still be able to [find] it.”) Thatcher draws a lot of inspiration from the late-aughts blogosphere. “This is so corny, but I went to an Animal Collective show when I was 16, and I was like, ‘Whoa, music can sound like this?’” she says. “It gave me a new perspective on music. They were the first band to get me into [making] music, because it felt there were no bounds.”

“I want to get as weird as humanly possible in movies.”

In typical Thatcher fashion, she has some misgivings about how people may perceive this side of her career. “I’m so wary of being [seen as] a singer-songwriter, because that’s not what I am. It’s more of just f*ckery,” she says. “I’ve been asked to do some acoustic sets, and I’m always like, ‘Oh f*ck.’” Like Animal Collective, her other big influences are mostly male artists — Radiohead, Smith, the New Wave bands her mom would play around the house — and she wonders if the comparisons she gets to other women artists, however flattering, have little to do with her songwriting. “Of course, even as an actor, you’re getting constant comparisons, especially as a woman, where it’s like, ‘You look like her,’” she says. “[The EP] was super low-key, and I liked it being that way, because I think if it tries to be something it’s not, or if I try too hard, I’m going to lose the love for it.”

Shortly after we speak, she’ll fly to Asheville, North Carolina, to start working on a new record. The songs she’s written so far are a little more electronic than what was on Pivot & Scrape. “I want to write pop music, but I don’t know how,” she says, shrugging. “My taste keeps changing.”

Top image credits: Prada clothing and belt, Giuseppe Zanotti shoes