Sophie Thatcher has made a career out of surviving on screen. At the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, she walked into a new kind of challenge: one where survival meant staying completely still.
At the press conference for Her Private Hell, Nicolas Winding Refn’s long-awaited return to feature filmmaking, PAGEONE Media correspondent Arne Gershwin Gogo asked Sophie what the director demanded of her that felt different from her previous work in horror and psychological thrillers.
“I think it was so stylized, it was so different, it was so still,” Sophie said. “I had to learn how to be completely honest with just my eyes. I couldn’t lean on anything. So I think that was the biggest challenge. I feel like I was stripped entirely bare.”
It is a striking admission from an actress who has spent the better part of her young career learning how to hold her ground in some of the most psychologically demanding genre productions in recent memory.
Sophie plays a hardened teenage castaway-turned-cannibal in Yellowjackets, and previously starred as a Mormon missionary caught in a twisted test of fate in the 2024 religious horror Heretic. She also stretched herself mentally and physically to play a robot used for pleasure in the sci-fi thriller Companion. Across all three projects, the common thread has been characters who must fight, survive, or resist forces beyond their control.
Sophie herself has acknowledged the theme running through her recent work: control, and what it takes to claim it back.
Her Private Hell places her in entirely different territory. The film follows Elle, a troubled young woman searching for her father after a mysterious mist engulfs a futuristic metropolis and unleashes a deadly, elusive presence known as the Leather Man. In this future world, Elle stars in a sci-fi film for her enigmatic father, played by Dougray Scott, whose wife, played by Havana Rose Liu, is her former lover. She spends time with strangers, including a troubled man played by Charles Melton, while a shadowy figure capable of inflicting great harm on all she holds dear looms largest throughout.
The film has been described as a horror-thriller built from combustible materials: violence, desire, menace, neon dread, and a young woman descending into a world that may not let her back out.
Her Private Hell marks Refn’s first feature since The Neon Demon, ending a ten-year absence from cinema screens. Refn previously won Best Director at Cannes for his 2011 neo-noir action drama Drive. His return to the Croisette was met with considerable anticipation, and the film did not go unnoticed.
As the credits rolled at the late-night screening, Sophie burst into tears as Refn paced back and forth, hyping up the crowd for what became a seven-minute ovation.
For Sophie, starring in a Refn film had long been a personal ambition. When she received an email that Refn was holding auditions for his next female lead, she said she had an immediate gut feeling, and now she leads under Refn’s direction.
It is also her first time at the Cannes Film Festival.
