A gifted actress with a unique look, she wowed many with her 2015 big-screen debut in Robert Eggers‘ The Witch, for which she won the Gotham Award for best breakthrough actor and the Cannes Film Festival’s Trophée Chopard for the industry’s most exciting young female talent, and shortly after which she was also nominated for the BAFTA EE Rising Star Award.
Past guests include Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey, Lorne Michaels, Meryl Streep, George Clooney, Barbra Streisand, Robert De Niro, Angelina Jolie, Eddie Murphy, Gal Gadot, Warren Beatty, Jennifer Lawrence, Snoop Dogg, Julia Roberts, Stephen Colbert, Reese Witherspoon, Aaron Sorkin, Margot Robbie, Ryan Reynolds, Nicole Kidman, Denzel Washington, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Matthew McConaughey, Kate Winslet, Jimmy Kimmel, Natalie Portman, Kevin Hart, Jennifer Lopez, Elton John, Judi Dench, Quincy Jones, Jane Fonda, Tom Hanks, Michelle Pfeiffer, Justin Timberlake, Elisabeth Moss, RuPaul, Cate Blanchett, Jimmy Fallon, Renee Zellweger, Michael Moore, Emilia Clarke, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Helen Mirren, Tyler Perry, Sally Field, Spike Lee, Lady Gaga, J.J.
Where were you born and raised? And what did your folks do for a living? I was born in Miami, Florida and raised between Buenos Aires, Argentina and London, England.
You wanted to act from an early age, but modeling entered the picture first…I was wearing my mum’s heels for the first time because I had my first “grown-up party” to go to, and I wanted to practice, so I took my dog for a walk in my mum’s heels, and this black car looked like it was following me.
This is what I need to do with my life, and if you could possibly help me out with that then I will do whatever you tell me to do.” And luckily, she took me very seriously, and I think I only did about three shoots before a very lucky shoot, and I met my agent from that.
And I remember being in the room thinking, “I can either be really, really upset about this, or I can just try and be helpful.” And so I started helping out with the lights, and helping pick pins out of people’s hair, and trying to make it work because I just thought, “Well, I might learn something.” And then eventually I sat down and I started reading a poem that I was going to be tested on, “Digging” by Seamus Heaney.
I look nothing like her, so I was never going to get it, but I was naive and I thought, “Miracles happen.” But yeah, not long after I got asked to audition for The Witch, so I went in and taped, but just never thought I would get it, because the character Thomasin was described as plain.
What was it like seeing yourself on the big screen? Rob showed us the film maybe two hours before the audience screening, and I was devastated.
But these are pivotal years in my development as a person, and I had put all of my energy into fleshing out other people, and I suddenly got to a point where I had no idea who I was, trying to hold on to relationships, and trying to build a home without having any kind of root or tether, because I hadn’t figured out that I had to be that for myself.
So having already been in emotional crisis leading up to Emma, you were looking ahead and it was just overwhelming that there was no end in sight? No, it was more that.
How did you hear about The Queen’s Gambit? I was just told that Scott Frank wanted to meet with me on a project that there was no a script for yet, but that there was a book, and if I could read the book as quickly as possible, he was in London and he wanted to meet me.
A lot of her thoughts as a kid were thoughts that I had, and they resonated in a way that was painful, but it was painful because it was familiar.
And then luckily Kate came to stay with me — Kate Dickie, who plays my mom in The Witch — and every day just more information would come in, and I’d just look at her and I’d say, “I think it’s going well.