Sophie Thatcher gets why you want to call her a scream queen. It just makes her groan. “It’s just… f*cking…” the 24-year-old grumbles, good-naturedly, over a mid-morning breakfast of pastries in New York City’s Chinatown. When we speak, she’s deep in the midst of an “exhausting” series of press tours, bouncing from promoting her debut EP last fall to November’s A24 horror flick Heretic, with Hugh Grant, to the rave-reviewed Companion released in January, and now the season 3 return of Showtime’s hit series Yellowjackets.
Thatcher’s star just won't stop rising. In the last few months, the Chicago native has been profiled in countless outlets. Our few hours together at the fabulous vintage store Superette on a frigid January morning are bookended by other interviews, so she’s been answering a lot of the same questions over and over again. “It's interesting having to repeat yourself so many times and not let that become degrading or make yourself feel like a phony,” Thatcher says, clearly, and understandably, a little wiped, while nonetheless charming and engaged (although the black coffee we’ve been downing all morning might have something to do with it).
Thatcher is a regular Holden Caulfield: very concerned about seeming to be “phony,” projecting prickliness from a distance while protecting a soft underbelly that you imagine she must access to do all that screaming and crying and bleeding on screen. She certainly shines in front of the camera, but stepping into the limelight as Rising Star Sophie Thatcher doesn’t come naturally to her, she says. “This is the first phase in my career so far where I’ve actually realized that I'm being perceived, and that's kind of f*cking me up, and I'm trying to distance myself from that and realize that I'm my own person outside of acting.”
So who is Sophie Thatcher outside of acting? For one, she’s very online. “Oh, I'm posting like, 24/7. It's awful. I’m on everything,” she says, laughing. She knows as well as the next person that technology is deeply flawed. “I do, not to be f*cking corny, wish I lived in a time without phones. But then I've learned so much about my taste and what I'm into on my phone. I feel so lucky to be in a time where finding music is the easiest it's ever been.”
Thatcher’s taste is finely honed as seen in the outfit she wears to the photo shoot: a cute ‘70s-Y2K-patterned button-down and a long, black, pinstripe coat. The outfit she brings with her is a sickening cream set with a dress, gloves, and headpiece, and the fur coat she borrowed from Superette for the shoot and then bought, after encouragement from her team, despite her fears it makes her look “c*nty.” (It really does look like it was made for her.)
Music is one place where her taste shines through; it's equally key to the plot of Yellowjackets. When I bring up my favorite needle drop of the first two seasons, Elliott Smith’s “Pitseleh,” Thatcher immediately responds, “That sh*t killed me. I was so mad it wasn’t my scene. I was like, out of every song, too, you had to do…?!” She groans again.
For her part, Thatcher says she’s already working on new music. After releasing her first EP last fall, when we speak, Thatcher is gearing up for one of her first live performances since it dropped, a charity show for those recovering from the January fires in Los Angeles. In hushed tones, she tells me David Byrne of the Talking Heads – the band she'd been listening to earlier that morning – is on the lineup. Exposed as she is out in the world, Thatcher loves the private music-making process. “I'm very obsessed with the recording part. I think that's the most magical part, working on it, fine-tuning it, that's the most exciting part,” she says. “You have control. I feel like in so much of my life I lack control.”
She’s clearly great at connecting with the art that is meaningful to her: In a move that kinda gagged me [complimentary] as a lifelong online indie person, Thatcher starred in the 2022 video for iconic ‘90s band Pavement and their “Harness Your Hopes,” originally released in 1999 and later viral on TikTok. (The video is also how she met her boyfriend, whom she described as a “huge Pavement fan” in an interview last fall.)
A lot of writing about Thatcher highlights the sort of darkness that emanates from much of her work. But that seriously oversimplifies what Thatcher does and why she does it.
As we speak, just days after Donald Trump’s inauguration and within weeks of the start of the devastating LA fires, Thatcher directs the conversation there, saying, “I think I have a project in March that's out of the country, which would be great because I just want to f*cking leave.” In the initial aftermath of both, she says, she just felt “defeated.”
“It's interesting that Companion is coming out around this time. So many of my movies talk about lack of control and not having control over your own body, too,” Thatcher says, as we observe that politicians continue attacking trans health care and abortion access.
Companion currently stands at 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, with reviewers praising the sharp-tongued satirical horror as an ideal balm for the arrival of a second Trump administration. Without spoiling anything (it’s better to let the film’s twists play out in front of you), the story centers on Thatcher’s character, Iris, and her boyfriend, played by Jack Quaid, who join friends at a remote cabin. Tonally, Companion is as if 2014’s Ex Machina was made by the team that made Bodies Bodies Bodies — current and darkly satirical, exaggerating the shitty, entitled dudes you might find on a dating app until it doesn’t feel all that exaggerated. As noted by Jeannette Catsoulis in The New York Times, it’s a useful and even subversive framing when plenty of men took the 2024 election as an opportunity to post the openly rapey phrase “Your body, my choice.”
“There's a sense of hopelessness that I'm really trying to combat,” Thatcher continues. “And if a movie that I do gives somebody confidence, or even if it sparks conversation after that, I'm doing something right. That's all that matters. Even if it's a tiny, tiny thing.”
Speaking of hopelessness: This brings us to the highly anticipated return of Yellowjackets, which premiered with a doubleheader on Valentine’s Day. For the uninitiated, the puzzle box show follows a high school girls' soccer team in 1996 that crash-lands and is stranded in the wilderness for some 18 months, cutting between that time and following the survivors’ adult counterparts 25 years later.
For fans of the show, you might be surprised that Thatcher's voice is a teensy bit higher than the one she affects to play Natalie “Nat” Scatorccio, adopted in part to mimic her adult counterpart Juliette Lewis. A few days before we talk, her hair goes from jet black to blond — a much better dye job than the one we see on teen Nat in seasons 2 and 3, whose roots are growing in after her character’s months in the wilderness.
Season 2 concludes with emotional intensity for Nat, in no small part due to the departure of Lewis, which led to one of their only scenes together. Thatcher quickly becomes emotional discussing Lewis’s final scene. “It's strange looking back on it because it is such a surreal moment and it's not something that actually happened [in the character's lives],” Thatcher recalls.
Yellowjackets at its core is a series about trauma. Nat spends her entire life plagued by it, from a violent childhood home to the plane crash, to struggling with substance abuse and the aftermath in adulthood. In its depiction, the show plays with your sense of reality: Is it supernatural or just the reasonable confusion and dissociation of living through hell? “They feel very real,” Thatcher says of those moments. “It's very blurred lines and boundaries between what's real and what's not. I think this season continues growing on that.”
The end of last season also featured the surprise crowning of young Nat as the “Antler Queen,” Thatcher’s favorite scene from the series, a poisonous development given the circumstances, but one that Thatcher believes is healthy for Nat. “In some strange way, those first couple of episodes, specifically the first, might be the healthiest we've seen Nat,” Thatcher says. “She comes from trauma. I think this is the most distracted she's ever been. She finally feels a purpose, which she lacked before.”
Season 3 is extremely under wraps. As far as I can tell, I’ve seen more of the new season than Thatcher and castmates Liv Hewson and Jasmin Savoy Brown. In her new role of authority, Nat complains about being the group's “camp counselor.” Thatcher rolls her eyes when I bring it up. “I know, so whiny,” she says, laughing, “but it’s because they’re teenagers.”
In the wilderness, teen angst has already had a body count. (RIP, Snacky.) While the girls project a sense of unanimity under Nat’s direction, tension, particularly from Sophie Nélisse’s Shauna, quickly boils over. Anger is an emotion that the characters of Yellowjackets often need to excise. “[Nat’s] anger was very pointed in the first and the second season and now it becomes more anger at the world, at her situation, at the absurdity of everything,” Thatcher says. “I feel like you can sense it bubbling a bit more. She's finally starting to let it out, whereas a lot of the other characters have let it out in other ways. It's strange that Natalie still feels the most sane, but I think she still has empathy and she's the one that holds her guilt in the most, in her stomach. That’s why she’s so f*cked up when she gets older.”
That emotional exorcism is what Thatcher hopes speaks to the audience. “Giving people hope and making people feel seen, I think that's the only thing that's important, about my job at least. Even if it's on a very small scale, and it's purely emotional, too, and it's not going to change their lives,” Thatcher says thoughtfully. “With a show like Yellowjackets, it shows such a wide array of emotions and trauma in different people — lesbians, bi-curious… Everything is explored in it. The fact that it's so normal in the show is great.”
Especially in such a violent political moment targeting marginalized communities, depicting women, queer, and trans people, and people of color feeling and embracing their scarier emotions through art has meaning. Darkness is what allows for light; there is not one without the other. And as the recently departed David Lynch would suggest, ignoring the former destroys the latter. (Thatcher and I share a love for the auteur, whose work is a clear influence on Yellowjackets.) Thatcher’s characters are a cathartic release, capable of wily survival and sardonic grins in the face of evil and fire and misogynists. Forget the “final girl”: Sophie Thatcher’s only at the beginning.
Photo credits
Photographer Skyli Alvarez
Associate Visuals Editor Bea Oyster
Design Director Emily Zirimis
Location Superette
Editorial credits
Editor in Chief Versha Sharma
Executive Editor Dani Kwateng
Associate Culture Director P. Claire Dodson
Associate Director of Audience Development and Analytics Mandy Velez Tatti
Sr. Social Media Manager Honestine Fraser
Writer Lex McMenamin
