From Theater Kid to Scream Queen, Sophie Thatcher Wants to Feel It All (2024)

Intense is a mild descriptor for the worlds Sophie Thatcher inhabits these days. But for the 23-year-old actor, these are comfortable spaces. “I’m just always craving intensity,” she explains. “Just craving that emotional release.” At the end of Season 2 of Yellowjackets, Showtime’s standout series about a ’90s high school soccer team that gets stranded in the wilderness, Thatcher’s Natalie gets picked to be the crew’s queen—a reveal fans have been waiting for since the show first exploded onto their TVs. In the real world, Thatcher spent 2023 leading The Boogeyman, a big-screen Stephen King adaptation, and this year, she’ll star in a pair of highly anticipated films: A24’s horror-filled Heretic, with Hugh Grant; and Companion, a sci-fi thriller from the team behind Barbarian.

Thatcher grew up a certified theater kid. Born in Chicago, she used to write and put on plays with her twin sister in the living room. Seeing their older sister perform in school productions of Stephen Sondheim musicals, like Company, had a galvanizing effect. “I thought it was the most magical thing in the world,” Thatcher says with a wider smile than her characters typically allow. “It made me feel so much. I knew that’s exactly what I wanted to do.”

Thatcher started acting professionally in local theater productions when she was just 10 and landed her first onscreen gig—a guest spot in Chicago P.D.—at 16. Just two years later, she clinched her first movie, starring alongside Pedro Pascal in 2018’s Prospect. However, it’s Yellowjackets that’s given Thatcher her breakout role as Natalie, the punk-rock outcast who proves to be essential when she shows she can wield a hunting rifle. “Playing Natalie for years, it’s interesting how it psychologically affects you and how Natalie is similar to me in some ways, but also very different. It’s an escape, but then it’s also facing yourself head on,” she says. “Natalie is bleeding into me to some extent.”

Even so, Thatcher was able to shake her off for this year’s Companion. She calls her character in the film “very, very different from Natalie” and “a completely different person at the beginning [and end] of the movie.” (The plot is still tightly under wraps.) “It starts off as a rom-com,” she explains, “and that was so much more challenging to me than I thought it would be, because I’m so used to playing in the darkness.”

Heretic, on the other hand, hits closer to home. The thriller follows two Mormon missionaries attempting to convert an ultimately dangerous man, and Thatcher wanted the role so badly, she used her own upbringing in the Mormon church to convince the team to cast her. Though she’s no longer a practicing Mormon (“I do not agree with pretty much anything”), she loves her family and “didn’t want to portray any clichés.” “I wanted it to feel like my family,” Thatcher says. “My co-star, Chloe East, also grew up Mormon. I feel like we both did a good job of making it real and grounded and not a joke.”

Not one to ever slow down—“I’m the type of person who wants to be working nonstop, because I want to be anywhere but in my own head,” she says—Thatcher took a break from filming this winter to focus on her first love: music. Growing up, she was constantly surrounded by music at church, singing in the choir while her mom played the organ. “I don’t want to put too much pressure on it, because music is such a therapeutic release,” she says, explaining that she plans to release an EP. “I have a lot more control with music, whereas with acting, there are so many people involved.” She dreams of one day finishing the short film she’s writing and also creating the score—and then maybe one day writing and directing a feature.

She recently returned to the Yellowjackets woods this spring. “I’m excited to fully reconnect with the cast—they’re family.” She says she’ll invite everyone over for wine and late-night karaoke; ever the theater student, one of her go-to songs is the dramatic “Maybe This Time” from Cabaret. “If it’s really late at night, and I’m feeling angsty and a little confident from some drinks, I’ll do it,” she confesses. “That’s a full character I can take on.”

Hair by Anton Alexander for Kérastase; makeup by Grace Ahn at Day One; manicure by Merrick Fisher and Naoko Saita at Opus Beauty; produced by Production Partners; photographed on location at The Hollywood Roosevelt.

A version of this article appears in the June/July 2024 issue of ELLE.

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