Sophie Wilde
Sophie Wilde is an actor, born 1998.
Wilde came up through television. The Stan drama Eden and the BBC One miniseries You Don't Know Me put her in front of two different audiences before she had a film anyone outside Australia had heard of.
Talk to Me changed that. As Mia she is the one who cannot leave the seance alone, and the performance holds because Wilde plays the need straight: there is no winking at the horror premise, and the scenes that could easily look silly are acted as though the stakes are real. It won her the AACTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role and brought a BAFTA Rising Star nomination and the Trophee Chopard.
What has followed looks like a deliberate spread rather than a horror career. She was Caitlyn Spies in Boy Swallows Universe, Esme in Babygirl, and Sophie Pettingel in The Portable Door, a comic fantasy that asks her to be the sane person in a silly world. Bring Her Back and Digger extend the run.
The through-line so far is that she reads as genuinely young on screen without playing young, which is rarer than it sounds and a window that closes. What she does with it is the interesting question, and the answer is still being written.
Movies (5)
TV (2)
Where to start with Sophie Wilde
There is one obvious entry point and it happens to be the right one: Talk to Me. It is a horror film about a party trick, and Wilde carries it by refusing to play her character as a victim of the premise. Watch what she does in the domestic scenes rather than the possessed ones; that is where the film does its real work.
For range, go to Boy Swallows Universe, where she is warm, adult and nowhere near a horror register, then Babygirl for a smaller part in a bigger cast. The Portable Door is the light one, a comic fantasy that mostly works while she is on screen and drifts when she is not.
Completists can go back to Eden for the early television, and forward to Bring Her Back and Digger.