Eliza Scanlen loves a dark project. When the script for Caddo Lake, a picture that straddles the mystery and family drama genres, found its way into her lap, she couldn’t resist. (That, and the fact that it also stars Dylan O’Brien, “obviously.”) The movie, in which Scanlen plays lead character Ellie, follows the disappearance of Ellie’s 8-year-old stepsister, Anna, on Karnack, Texas’s eerie Caddo Lake. The search for Anna unravels a series of otherworldly family secrets.
Caddo Lake is full of twists and turns that will have you rewinding your stream to make sure you caught the plot changes correctly. For Scanlen, reading the script elicited frantic page-turning and more than one, “Wait, what?!” Despite the M. Night Shyamalan-produced feature’s tumultuous storyline and fraught character relationships, Scanlen adoringly describes the movie as, “the gift that keeps on giving.” Which is funny, because it’s exactly how her fans might describe her.
The 25-year-old has already proven to be an acting powerhouse; each time she graces the big screen, she is simply enthralling—and often chilling. Scanlen first burst onto the scene in HBO’s 2018 mini-series Sharp Objects, opposite Amy Adams and Patricia Clarkson, as the enigmatic, psychopathic 13-year-old Amma Crellin. Her spine-shivering, stomach-knotting portrayal of the sinister teen left audiences wanting more, and although a second season never followed, Scanlen kept coming back to Hollywood.
On a Friday afternoon in October, just days before the October 10 release of Caddo Lake, Scanlen appears on my Zoom screen, set against a backdrop of the perpetual soft glow coming through the window behind her. The gentle sunlight is like a personification of the Hollywood starlet herself, who speaks so politely in her charming Australian accent, carefully considering each question and taking any moment to graciously shout-out her filmmakers and costars. Despite her sweet-tempered demeanor, Scanlen gravitates toward grim gigs—and it’s made her quite a force.
She returned to her horror roots in Old and The Devil All the Time, battles inner conflict in The Starling Girl, embodies a seriously ill teenager in Babyteeth, and also hit the theater stage in productions of Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird in Australia. Even in Greta Gerwig’s delightful Little Women, Scanlen plays the scarlet fever-stricken Beth March.
Next, Scanlen shares she will depart from her comfort zone of thrillers and chillers to star in a comedy, where she’ll have the “treat” of laughing every day. But first, she relishes in the darkness that is Caddo Lake. Read on to learn how the Sydney native encapsulated a troubled teen from Texas (accent and all), why O’Brien is the best kind of neighbor, and whether or not she would reprise the role of Amma Crellin.
What drew you to this project, Caddo Lake?
What drew me to the project was Celine [Held] and Logan [George] as filmmakers. I hadn’t heard of them before, but when their script landed in my inbox, I did a deep dive on them and watched their first feature film Topside, which completely blew me away. It was innovative and distinctive and unique. I watched their short film Caroline as well, and it was just such a powerful short film—shorts in particular are very hard to nail. I had this sense that they were two hungry, ambitious filmmakers who were trying to do something different. The script really affirmed that, and I found it really interesting the way they were trying to straddle both the mystery genre with a quite grounded family drama. And also Dylan, obviously.
You’re from Sydney, Australia, which is very different from swampy Texas. What sort of preparation did you do to bring this story and this community to life?
A lot of the preparation happened on location. Because the lake is the central element to the film, a lot of the character building happened while I was there. And because Celine and Logan are the filmmakers that they are, they engaged with the community. They introduced me to people from the community that they’d met when they were writing the film, and we had a lot of conversations.
[Celine and Logan] were very hands-on and invested in both Dylan and I as actors, and they wanted the experience to be creatively fulfilling for us, so whatever that entailed, they wanted to facilitate and encourage. For me, that was a lot of spending time with Celine and Logan and understanding their vision. Obviously you can do the homework and the character prep, but what I love about being in films is that it’s a collaborative, joint effort, and you are one piece that exists in the fabric of the film. A lot of your work is trying to understand the world that everyone’s creating, not just the internal world you’re creating.
Did adopting the accent help you embody Ellie?
Of course. I love an accent. I had some experience in doing that accent before, but we wanted to find an accent that wasn’t too jarring, that kind of blended into the film and didn’t stand out too much. Accents are definitely my entry into a character.
Ellie is saddled with a lot of turmoil—her father leaves, she resents her mother, she doesn’t feel connected to her stepfather, but she also wants to have a relationship with her stepsister Anna… and then, Anna disappears and all of these secrets come out. Ellie’s hurting and sometimes she lashes out, but she also has a really good heart. How did you balance all of that?
Humans are complex, and we can be inherently very good people, and at the same time lash out and be unkind. Ellie carries a lot of trauma and feelings of rejection, and she uses that as ammunition to hurt other people and punish her mother. She’s quite a practical, pragmatic person, and probably shows that she cares by doing rather than being physically affectionate. For example, as soon as Anna goes missing, she’s out there leading the search. But also, she’s still a kid, so she’s coming of age in very difficult circumstances.
You’ve said in a previous interview that you “look for projects that portray the female experience accurately.” Clearly, Ellie has a tense relationship with her mother, but what part of the female experience is coming to light here?
Everyone has a complicated relationship with their mother. You can adore your mother and at the same time find them sometimes very frustrating. When you get older, you realize that your parents had a life before you, and that their sole purpose in life wasn’t just to raise you. Ellie’s mum suffers from her own feelings of rejection from being left by Ellie’s dad, and there’s a lot of resentment that exists between them. Ellie resents her mother for hiding so much from her, and she wants to be treated like an adult, but at the same time, really needs a mum. That’s an interesting element of the female experience. You want your mum to see you eye-to-eye, but at the same time, we all crave being mothered and being looked after. All of us crave that maternal presence.
Your and Dylan’s characters are super connected, yet you never appear in a scene together. Was it still important that you establish a relationship on set? What was it like to work with him?
Our relationship was not established on set, but off set. We were definitely playing tag team, and it was quite strange, because I never really got to see what Dylan did, but I’d always be arriving on set as he was leaving. We were very much passing the baton to each other. But when we were shooting the film, we actually lived right next to each other in these two log cabins, so we were forced to spend a lot of time with each other. And thank God we liked each other.
We did have a lot of conversations about our characters. Making a film is such a group effort, and part of your job as an actor is not just understanding your character’s journey, but also understanding how you fit into the rest of the film. Understanding what Dylan was doing and the world they were building was really important for me.
It’s great working with Dylan—not that I can say I worked with him. He was trying to lose weight for the film, so he would often, in his weaker moments, go to Walmart and buy loads of junk food and then abandon them by dropping them at my door. And on his days off, he’d get me very interesting gifts. He left a pumpkin at my door for Halloween. He is a very generous man.
This movie deals with time travel. If there’s one period you could travel to in real life, what would it be and why?
I did a show recently that is set in this time, probably the beginning of the 1920s in London, Soho. When, after World War I, everyone’s just going wild and everyone’s finally free and liberated, and the hedonism of the 1920s. I think it would be quite fun.
In previous interviews, you’ve talked about being afraid to take up space. How has that changed? How has your confidence changed?
That’s interesting to revisit because I feel like I’ve really grown as an actor. I have had the privilege of working with a lot of female filmmakers and producers and actors, who I look up to a lot. Confidence comes with experience; the more you’re exposed to something, the easier it becomes. I actually find that now in my working life, I find it easy to take up space and have good boundaries. That comes with the privilege of working with a lot of women who have taught me, like, “No, you should be asking for this thing” and “No, that’s not okay. They can’t do that to you”—especially because there’s no rule book when it comes to this career. It’s really important to have those people in your corner. Now I’m working on how to do that in my own life.
Your work in Sharp Objects is just phenomenal. Looking back, how did that job help inform or prepare you for your subsequent roles?
Sharp Objects taught me to be ambitious. When I was doing Sharp Objects, I really did have no clue what I was doing, and that was a blessing in disguise. It meant that I went in, I did so much homework, and I went in with this unbridled ambition that I look back on now and wish I could get back somehow. It did tell me that you have to wing it a lot of the time and the only way you’re going to learn a new thing is by doing it..[Next,] I’m doing a play that’s a comedy, and I’ve never done a comedy before.
I imagine that comedy is a nice break from all the traumatic roles you’ve taken on.
I know. Yeah, it will be a treat to laugh every day.
If the producers had a major change of heart and greenlit a second season, would you reprise Amma?
Yes, in a heartbeat. No one has asked me that question before. I would 100 percent.
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