The 52nd Deauville American Film Festival has announced that Sophie Thatcher will receive this year’s Rising Star Award, a recognition that feels both timely and inevitable for an actress who has quietly assembled one of the most compelling filmographies of her generation. The ceremony, scheduled for Saturday, September 5 in the picturesque French seaside town, will be followed by a screening of “Her Private Hell,” the new film from Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn in which Thatcher delivers what many critics are already calling her most daring performance to date.
There is something fitting about Deauville honoring Thatcher at this particular moment. The festival has long served as a bridge between American talent and European audiences, and Thatcher’s career embodies that transatlantic sensibility—rooted in the rigorous traditions of American theater yet drawn to the kind of challenging, often unsettling material that has defined the most exciting corners of international cinema. Watching her work, you get the sense of an actor who approaches each role as an excavation, unearthing something raw and unexpected from characters who exist at the edges of conventional storytelling.
Born and raised in Chicago, Thatcher’s introduction to performance came through the city’s vibrant theater scene, where she appeared in musicals including “Oliver!” and “Seussical,” as well as stage adaptations of “The Diary of Anne Frank” and “The Secret Garden.” Those early years on stage instilled a discipline that would serve her well when she transitioned to screen work, though nothing could have quite prepared her for the whirlwind that followed. Her feature film debut came in 2019 with “Prospect,” a modest but ambitious science-fiction film directed by Zeek Earl and Christopher Caldwell, in which she held her own opposite Pedro Pascal and Jay Duplass. That same year, she appeared in Noble Jones’ “The Tomorrow Man,” demonstrating an early versatility that would become her trademark.
It was her breakout role in 2021, however, that introduced Thatcher to a global audience. Playing Natalie in Showtime’s Emmy-nominated survival drama series “Yellowjackets,” she brought a haunted intensity to the proceedings, capturing the particular terror of adolescence when it is stripped of all social safeguards and thrown into the wilderness. The series, which follows a high school girls’ soccer team whose plane crashes in the remote Canadian wilderness, became a cultural phenomenon, and Thatcher’s performance was singled out as one of its anchoring elements. Here was an actor who could convey volumes with a glance, whose stillness on screen felt like a coiled spring of emotion and dread.
In 2023, Thatcher took on the role of Sadie Harper in Rob Savage’s adaptation of Stephen King’s “The Boogeyman,” a film that required her to navigate the treacherous waters of horror with the kind of grounded realism that distinguishes the genre’s most effective entries. The following year brought “Heretic,” the A24 religious horror film in which she played Sister Barnes opposite Hugh Grant. The film, directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, placed Thatcher in the kind of morally complex, philosophically charged scenario that has become something of a specialty for her, and she responded with a performance that felt both deeply felt and intellectually rigorous.
Perhaps nothing has demonstrated Thatcher’s range quite like 2025’s “Companion,” the science-fiction thriller directed by Drew Hancock in which she starred opposite Jack Quaid. Her portrayal of Iris, a character whose journey takes unexpected and deeply unsettling turns, earned widespread critical praise, with Rolling Stone noting that she had “earned her place among the genre’s best.” It was the kind of performance that announces a major talent fully coming into her own, and it set the stage for what has become one of the most interesting career trajectories in contemporary American cinema.
This year’s “Her Private Hell” represents a significant milestone for both Thatcher and Refn, who returns with his first feature film in a decade. The film, which premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, finds Thatcher playing Elle, a rising actress whose life spirals into chaos when her best friend marries her father, all while a serial killer stalks a futuristic metropolis. It is exactly the kind of visceral, visually audacious material that defines Refn’s sensibility, and Thatcher has spoken about the collaborative process of bringing the character to life. “Working with Nicolas was unlike anything I had experienced before,” she said in a recent interview. “He pushes you to places you didn’t know you could go, and the result is something that feels almost unnervingly real.”
The Deauville festival’s decision to honor Thatcher with the Rising Star Award comes at a moment when her career is poised to reach new heights. Her upcoming projects include Jenny Suen’s comedy “Peaches,” Jennifer Kent’s science-fiction drama “The Girl Who Was Plugged In,” and Chris Andrews’ action film “Cavendish.” Each project represents a distinct genre and creative challenge, suggesting an actor who is deliberately avoiding easy categorization in favor of something more interesting—a career built on instinct and curiosity rather than calculation.
