Heroine 22 Cover Story

The meeting of Sophie Thatcher and Elijah Wood feels less like a conventional celebrity interview and more like a séance. Seated across from one another, framed by shadows and reverberations of film history, the two actors speak in a cinematic language thick with ghosts—David Lynch, Todd Solondz, Roman Polanski, and the slow, creeping stillness of Wim Wenders’ lens. This is not small talk. This is communion.

It’s fitting, then, that this cover story doesn’t unfold like press-cycle fluff but like a long-deferred echo: two performers bound by a shared frequency, both drawn to roles that straddle the threshold of sanity, sensitivity, and surreal dread. The connection is immediate, the tone electric with mutual recognition. Elijah Wood—cult hero, fantastical protagonist, and experimental producer—meets his spiritual heir in Thatcher, whose rise has been both meteoric and unyieldingly off-center.

Thatcher’s work is not about surface. Her gaze doesn’t simply project; it absorbs. Whether playing Natalie in Yellowjackets, a role that demands a constant negotiation between innocence and ruin, or confronting metaphysical evil in A24’s upcoming Heretic, she doesn’t act so much as she inhabits. Her choices, like her inspirations, lean toward the warped and the wounded. “There’s something sacred about discomfort,” she says at one point, referencing Eraserhead and Welcome to the Dollhouse in the same breath. “That’s where the most human things live. Where people are forced to be ugly.”

It’s a statement that could easily come from Wood, whose post-Lord of the Rings career has been a masterclass in radical self-reinvention. His fascination with genre—especially horror—has defined the last two decades of his work. From Maniac to Come to Daddy, and through his producing banner SpectreVision, Wood has created a legacy rooted in exploring psychological terrain that most actors would avoid. For him, horror is not escapism; it’s confrontation.

That shared philosophy is what undergirds their conversation. The aesthetic overlaps are obvious—both are cinephiles, both worship at the altar of low-budget unease, both prefer a scene smeared with blood or dread over one polished with heroism. But what’s more compelling is their emotional congruence. They speak with a kind of neurotic tenderness about performance, describing the art not as transformation, but excavation.

“You’re not pretending to be someone else,” Wood tells Thatcher. “You’re digging until you hit something real. And it’s usually the thing you don’t want anyone to see.”

Thatcher nods. “You learn to live with being raw. And maybe a little haunted.”

There’s a thematic throughline that defines Thatcher’s ascension, and it’s the way she channels psychic volatility into physical stillness. In Yellowjackets, the show that solidified her as one of television’s most compelling new actors, her character Natalie oscillates between rebellion and damage, punk rage and traumatic silence. Her body holds tension like a locked safe, but her eyes betray everything. In Companion, Drew Hancock’s noir-tinged debut, Thatcher plays a woman unraveling inside a puzzlebox of obsession and fate—a role reminiscent of the ‘90s thrillers she references throughout the interview. “It’s the Bridget Fonda, Jennifer Jason Leigh archetype, but flipped,” she says. “There’s agency in her unraveling. I wanted her spiral to feel like a decision.”

Wood, ever the empath, understands the balancing act. He remarks on the claustrophobia of genre acting, how the emotion must remain authentic even when the setting is outlandish. “Horror exaggerates the stakes,” he says, “but it also strips everything bare. It forces you to ask what you’re really afraid of, and then put that on screen.”

When asked about fear, both pause. Then Thatcher offers a reply that lingers long after: “I’m not scared of monsters. I’m scared of being seen too clearly.”

This tension—between presence and concealment—is what makes her such a captivating figure for this moment. In a culture obsessed with transparency and overexposure, Thatcher operates like a riddle. Her references say as much. She invokes Mission of Burma, not for their post-punk aggression but for their resistance to mass appeal. She names Rosemary’s Baby not just for its horror, but for the way it captured isolation in plain sight. Her taste is a map to her method—esoteric, but exacting.

Wood sees it instantly. “You’re not building a persona,” he says. “You’re building a private language. That’s why it resonates.”

The two drift easily into cinematic tangents, referencing underground films, VHS rarities, and the ambient panic of sound design. They talk about the power of silence in horror, about how visual rhythm can replace exposition. “Some things should remain unexplained,” Thatcher insists. “We don’t need everything spelled out. Uncertainty is a form of truth.”

It’s a stance that echoes in Heretic, the forthcoming A24 project where she stars as a devout missionary trapped in an escalating battle of ideology and violence. It’s a film soaked in dread, not through gore, but through moral confusion. “The horror isn’t the violence,” she explains. “It’s not knowing whether your beliefs are protecting you—or destroying you.”

Wood leans forward. “That’s the kind of horror that lasts. The one that asks you to choose a side, and then punishes you either way.”

Their discussion circles, slowly, toward the creative process itself. They both reject the binary of method vs. naturalism. Instead, they describe performance as “tuning”—a constant adjusting of emotional frequencies. “Sometimes it’s less about who the character is,” says Wood, “and more about what vibration you want to sustain. How much tension can you hold without breaking?”

“Exactly,” Thatcher agrees. “You don’t play the breakdown. You play the tremor before.”

The interview’s mood is never static. It fluctuates between fun nerdery and existential reflection. At one point, they compare movie sets to haunted houses—full of artifacts, energy, and unseen histories. Wood recounts the feeling of filming in abandoned buildings; Thatcher smiles knowingly. “There’s always something left behind,” she says. “You walk into a room, and you feel who was pretending there before you.”

Though generations apart, they speak like two chapters of the same manifesto: art should be strange, unsettling, emotionally honest. Popularity is not the goal—intensity is. Wood praises Thatcher’s commitment to the “unmarketable moment,” her refusal to dilute performances for mass comfort. “There’s nothing safe about what you do,” he tells her. “That’s why it matters.”

By the end of the interview, one senses that what binds them is not genre, but conviction. They are both believers—not in Hollywood myths, but in the power of story as emotional archeology. They share a distrust of polish, a love of awkwardness, and a reverence for art that resists neat resolution.

As Heroine 22’s cover captures Thatcher poised between light and darkness, it’s not hard to see her not just as the present face of horror-inflected performance, but as its compass. Where she goes next is unknowable—and that is her power.

Wood sums it up best in a line that could double as an epigraph for both their careers:

“Some people play roles. Others summon them. And those are the performances you never forget.”

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