Glass speaks to Australian actor SOPHIE WILDE about bringing earthly authenticity into supernatural realms in her debut feature film, Talk to Me
From Autumn Issue 55
Absolutely not. That was Sophie Wilde’s reaction when directors Danny and Michael Philippou asked if she wanted to spend a night in the church of the most haunted town in Australia.
The 26-year-old doesn’t even like horror movies but the directing duo thought a little excursion to Old Tailem Village would be a good way for the cast to bond before starting rehearsals for their chilling indie film, Talk to Me.
Receiving applause from Hollywood’s horror auteurs, Ari Aster (Hereditary) and Jordan Peele (Get Out, Us, Nope), the mind-bending project has launched Wilde into the stratosphere. Lucky for her, the team ran out of time to visit that cursed church, but her gripping lead performance might just leave you equally terrified.
Photographer: Daniel Jackont
I speak to Wilde over the phone in Sydney as she walks around the streets she grew up in. The actor settles in one of her favourite spots – a matchbox cafe called Tokyo Lamington that serves the faithful Aussie treats with twists like yuzu meringue and matcha (for the uninitiated, lamingtons are sponge cakes dipped in chocolate and rolled in desiccated coconut).
Wilde can’t believe I haven’t been there before: “Seriously, these [lamingtons] are so good. They’re off their head.”
The irony of her last phrase isn’t lost on me. We’re here to discuss the actor’s breakout role in Talk to Me, her debut feature film, where a haunted hand intoxicates a group of teens, plunging them into possessed states. Its reception can only be described as dizzying.
After screening at Sundance, the film wowed buyers so much that it sparked a vicious bidding war, with A24 taking the win. It was a smart move – Wilde and I happen to be chatting on the same day she found out the film surpassed Hereditary as A24’s highest grossing horror. Her response is a theatrical, “What the hell is going on?”
Photographer: Daniel Jackont
While the film’s critical success is nothing short of “surreal”, the actor’s first encounter with her character, Mia, felt natural. “Even in my initial audition, I knew exactly who she was … her ins and outs. It fitted like a glove.”
That immediate sense of connection comes across in her gripping performance as a misfit who yearns to reconnect with her dead mother through the cursed hand, touching on the gnawing, ghostly essence of grief.
“You live and breathe every moment and try to empathise as much as you can with a character,” she says. “People are multifaceted and nuanced. They can operate in multiple spaces at once. If you’re trying to be a real person, you’ve got to attempt to emulate that as best you can.”
It’s clear that authenticity is the north star of Wilde’s philosophy towards her craft, and Mia’s complexity provides the perfect playground for the actor to live out this ethos. You may know Wilde from her role as Scout in Stan’s Eden, Sophia in the ITV miniseries Tom Jones, and soon to be seen in Netflix’s Everything Now, but Mia feels different to anything she’s played before.
“I didn’t have to reach for her to form character. A lot of Mia was within me and it was more about finding and enhancing those parts of myself.”
Photographer: Daniel Jackont
This innate bond wasn’t the only thing that attracted Wilde. Forever drawn to the new, she relishes the opportunity to present a different side of Australian cinema. “So much of Aussie film is beautiful, but it’s set in nature and the outback,” she explains.
“Our film feels really fresh. It’s urban and it’s young.” A far cry from the sweeping red plains of Australia, Talk to Me opens with a single take of a house party in suburban Adelaide. Strobe lights flash; teens weave around each other like ants; there’s a worn-out Mum in the kitchen, chopping vegetables for a food platter that no one will touch.
Shots like these remind the star of scenes from her own life growing up in Sydney’s Inner West suburbs. It’s a welcome injection of new and quirky landscapes into a genre that often falls prey to tedium.
Photographer: Daniel Jackont
As Wilde reminisces on her teenage years from the cafe in Newtown, I realise the stroke of serendipity – she’s a stone’s throw away from her secondary school. I wonder if acting has always been a passion of hers? She confirms my suspicions, “It’s the earliest thing I can remember wanting to do.”
Her grandparents instilled in her a love for the arts from a young age, taking Wilde to see plays and enrolling her in the National Institute of Dramatic Art when she was five. But it was a VHS box set of Audrey Hepburn films that sealed her fate: “I watched Roman Holiday and thought ‘I want to do that. I want to be Audrey Hepburn’.”
Although Mia isn’t on holiday romancing with strangers in Rome, the character gave Wilde her first taste of a genre she’d never worked in before. The actor adapted quickly, getting used to the “nasty” scleral contacts that blacked-out her eyes and listening to Death Grips to prepare for darker beats.
After long days shooting murderous spirits taking over her soul, how did she keep things fun? Uno Dare works wonders apparently.
Photographer: Daniel Jackont
Chatting about demonic netherworlds with someone so grounded and effervescent is a little jarring. Wilde radiates warmth; her enthusiasm instantly disarms. We’re just getting into the nitty-gritty of an improvised scene where she repeatedly smashes herself in the face when Wilde runs into a friend from pre-school and lets out a gleeful, “Hi! Nice to see you!” I can hear her beaming through the phone.
The actor is grateful for the “immense amount of creative freedom” entrusted to her by the Phillipou twins. Back on the topic of improvisation, Wilde reveals to me that those few seconds of her hitting herself in the final cut were part of a seven-minute take where she had the space to “go wherever [she] needed to go.
Danny and Michael definitely knew what they wanted, but they let you find that in yourself as an artist.” For someone who finds indelible joy in flexing her creative muscles, I deduce that Wilde is at her best when she’s given that freedom to push her boundaries and explore new depths.
Photographer: Daniel Jackont
Even though she’s comfortable in darker realms, lightness and play are a crucial part of the arsenal that makes Wilde such a delight to watch. She recalls one scene where Mia is inhabited by a spectre that sings fluent French.
A crowd of onlookers film the spectacle, watching through their phone screens as she trills in foreign vibrato. “That’s why so much of the film works. Yes, there’s moments of isolation, but it’s also funny.” Wilde is humble but not so much as to be self-deprecating. She recognises the strength in her versatility, dancing on that elusive line between humour and heartbreak.
Amid all the noise and glowing reviews, I ask where she wants to channel her energies next, but the actor is looking in the same direction that shot her to stardom – homeward. “I’m proud of the stories that we have in Australia … the ones that are being told and the ones that are yet to be told. I want to continue being part of that storytelling legacy.”
As she steps into the new, it’s clear that Wilde will never be too far from where it all began.
